Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research
[Nature Article] CAPP's Axion Experiment mentioned in Nature News
CAPP/IBS's axion experiment was mentioned in Nature News section on November 2, 2016.
The highlights are below.
Title: Axion alert! Exotic particle detector may miss out on dark matter
Author: Davide Castelvecchi
"Supercomupter calcuation suggests hypothesized particle may be heavier than thought.
An ambitious supercomputer calculation has brought good and bad news for physicists hunting the 'axion' - a hypothetical particle that is considered a leading candidate for dark matter."
The result shows that the axion, if it exists, could be at least ten times heavier than previously thought. If true, that's a useful clue on how to find the particle.
The axion was hypothesized in 1977 as a potential solution to a paradox arising from how the strong nuclear force - which binds particles in the nucleus of an atom together - affects antimatter and matter. (It would explain an unexpected symmetry whereby that force has the same effect on matter as it does on antimatter.) but researchers also think that the axion might be one of the components of dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to make up about 85% of the Universe's mass. So if the particle exists, it would solve two problems at once.
Early calculations had suggested that the axion should have a mass of around 5 microelectronvolts (µeV), about 100 billiion times lighter than the electron...................
But in a paper published on 2 November in Nature,............report the results of a large, complicated calculation showing that - under certain assumptions - the axion's mass is most likely to fall in the range between 50 and 1,500 (µeV)..........................................
The team used a supercomputer at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany to simulate the creation of elementary particles moments after the Bing Bang, going back to times when temperatures soared above a million billion degrees, ten times hotter those achieved in previous simulations. This was when axions - if they exist - would have been produced in abundance...........................................................................................
Another detector being built at the Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research in Daejeon, South Korea, may be sensitive to higher masses, and so would the proposed MADMAX experiment, which was first suggested by one of the co-authors of the Nature paper....................................................................................................................."
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