Physics Confronts Its Heart of Darkness

Lee Billings in Scientific American:

Physics has missed a long-scheduled appointment with its future—again. The latest, most sensitive searches for the particles thought to make up dark matter—the invisible stuff that may comprise 85 percent of the mass in the cosmos—have found nothing. Called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), these subatomic shrinking violets may simply be better at hiding than physicists thought when they first predicted them more than 30 years ago. Alternatively, they may not exist, which would mean that something is woefully amiss in the underpinnings of how we try to make sense of the universe. Many scientists still hold out hope that upgraded versions of the experiments looking for WIMPs will find them but others are taking a second look at conceptions of dark matter long deemed unlikely.

Whatever dark matter is, it is not accounted for in the Standard Model of particle physics, a thoroughly-tested “theory of almost everything” forged in the 1970s that explains all known particles and all known forces other than gravity. Find the identity of dark matter and you illuminate a new path forward to a deeper understanding of the universe—at least, that is what physicists hope. WIMPs would get their gravitational heft from being somewhere between one and a thousand times the mass of a proton. Their sole remaining connection to our familiar world would be through the weak nuclear force, which is stronger than gravity but only active across tiny distances on the scale of atomic nuclei. If they exist, WIMPs should surround us like an invisible fog, their chances of interacting with ordinary matter so remote that one could pass through light-years of elemental lead unscathed.

More here.