Searching For Dark Matter

It has been over three decades since the 1980s, ever since scientists agreed that most of the matter in the known universe is invisible, and that “dark matter” is the one responsible for gravitationally shaping the cosmos. It has also been over three decades since the search for this dark matter began.

They first set out in pursuit of a heavy, sluggish form of dark matter called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP — the early favorite candidate for the cosmos’s missing matter because it could solve another, unrelated puzzle in particle physics. Over the decades, teams of physicists set up ever larger targets, in the form of huge crystals and multi-ton vats of exotic liquids, hoping to catch the rare jiggle of an atom when a WIMP banged into it.

But these detectors have stayed quiet, and physicists are increasingly contemplating a broader spectrum of possibilities. On the heavy end, they say the universe’s invisible matter could clump into black holes as heavy as stars. At the other extreme, dark matter could spread out in a fine mist of particles thousands of trillions of trillions of times lighter than electrons.

As the years passed by, new hypotheses were made, and with new hypotheses also came new methods. Quanta Magazine documents the many types of experiments and hypotheses that were made in search for the elusive dark matter. Read more about the story over at the site.