In the search for dark matter, even sugar counts: what we use at home to make cakes can help reveal one of the greatest mysteries of the Universe.
Scientists have devised a new way to search for dark matter using large crystals of sucrose… or table sugar. Yes, the sugar we use to cook or put in coffee. Used for research on… astrophysics. It’s really real and there is no humor here.
Much of this research has focused on so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPsits acronym in English), which for a long time were considered the most promising candidates for dark matter.
Now, Federica Petricca, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, and her team have searched for these lighter WIMPs using a detector made from sugar crystals cooled to extreme temperatures.
Petricca’s team started by growing sucrose crystals from a concentrated sugar solution over the course of a week. then, they reduced the temperature of the crystals to seven thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.
The researchers ran the experiment for 19 hours, and although the sugar crystals lit up to levels consistent with larger particles, they did not measure any fainter detections that might have been produced by a WIMP.
Still, scientists believe that sugar could even be the solution, or rather the means, to achieve an end so desired by astrophysicists: discovering the much-coveted dark matter.
