Could We Create Dark Matter?
85% of the matter in our universe is a mystery. We don’t know what it’s made up of.
We’ve yet to directly observe dark matter, but scientists theorize that we may actually be able to create it in the most powerful particle collider in the world. That’s the 27 kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland.
In the LHC(Large Hadron Collider), two proton beams move in opposite directions and are accelerated to near the speed of light. At four collision points, the beams cross and protons smash into each other.
Protons are made of much smaller components called quarks and gluons.
In most ordinary collisions, the two protons pass through each other without any significant outcome.
However, in about one in a million collisions, two components hit each other so violently, that most of the collision energy is set free producing thousands of new particles.
It’s only in these collisions that very massive particles, like the theorized dark matter, can be produced.
So it takes quadrillions of collisions combined with theoretical models to even start to look for dark matter. That’s what the LHC is currently doing. By generating a mountain of data, scientists at CERN are hoping to find more tiny bumps in graphs that will provide evidence for yet unknown particles, like dark matter. Or maybe what they’ll find won’t be dark matter, but something else that would reshape our understanding of how the universe works entirely.
Watch this video to understand better.