Astronomical Particle Dark Matter Telescope

The boxes show how galactic superclusters and filaments grew over time, from billions of years after the Big Bang to today’s structures. Credits: Work modified by CXC / MPE / V. Springel

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The discovery of Axion is the main link in the history of science. This hypothetical particle could solve two fundamental problems of modern physics simultaneously: the charge and valence problem of strong interactions, and the dark matter puzzle. However, despite the great scientific interest in finding them, research on high radio frequencies – above 6 GHz – has been ruled out for the lack of high-sensitivity technologies that can be built at an affordable cost. Until now.

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) will participate in international cooperation to develop DALI (Dark photons and Axion– particles like overlappingThe Dark Matter Astronomy Particle Telescope Experiment, whose scientific objective is to find axons and paraphotons in the 6 to 60 GHz range. The prototype, Proof of Concept, is currently in the design and manufacturing phase of the IAC. That White paper The description of the experiment has been accepted for publication at Journal of Cosmology and Astrophysics (JCAP).

In the 1970s, theory predicted that axons were hypothetical low mass particles that would interact weakly with standard particles such as nucleons and electrons, as well as with photons. This proposed interaction has been studied in an attempt to reveal axons with various types of instruments. One promising technique is studying the interaction of axons with standard photons.

The axons “mix” with photons under the influence of a strong external magnetic field, such as those generated by superconducting magnets in particle detectors or used in magnetic resonance medical diagnostics, and produce a weak radio or microwave signal. This signal has been researched in various experiments since the late 1980s, and it is just the signal we want to detect now with DALI, although there is a new, almost non-existent set of parameters that will become available for the former. time thanks to this experiment, explained Javier de Miguel, IAC researcher and first author of the study.

The first coaxial detectors, manufactured in the 1980s and 1990s, used a resonant cavity, inside a super-magnet, that amplified the weak microwave signal expected from the axis, in an attempt to fit it into the range of power scientific scientists could detect. instrument. Unfortunately, the hole size is inversely proportional to the scan frequency, and for the lumen axis it is too small to be produced for frequencies greater than about 6 GHz.

For this reason, this new experiment incorporates the most promising high-frequency scanning technology, and incorporates it into a practical design that also adds to the capabilities of the coaxial dark matter astronomy particle detector. In this way, DALI includes powerful superconducting magnets, axion detectors with new resonators to make weak axon-induced signals detectable, and ultrasimulators to enable it to scan objects and areas in the sky for dark matter.

In this way, DALI can help find axons, pseudo particles in nature similar to the Higgs boson, which was discovered in 2012 in CERN, And a promising dark matter candidate. Dark matter is a fundamental component of the universe that interacts very weakly with ordinary matter, and is therefore very difficult to detect directly, but its discovery will allow us to explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, and why their structures are in spiral galaxies. The universe is evolving in the way it has so far, among other mysteries.