Researchers from the University of Southern California, Columbia University, and the University of Rome Tor Vergata have proposed a novel approach to detecting dark matter, a mysterious and elusive form of matter that makes up approximately 27% of the universe’s mass-energy content. The team, led by Tomás Arias and including Antonino Bellini, Gianluca Cavoto, Angelo Esposito, Francesco Pandolfi, Guglielmo Papiri, Antonio D. Polosa, and Tyler Wu, suggests that hydrogenated carbon structures could serve as highly sensitive detectors for dark matter particles with masses ranging from 1 MeV to 100 MeV.
Dark matter particles, if they exist in this mass range, could interact with the nuclei of hydrogen atoms within these carbon structures, causing a proton to be ejected. This process, known as quasi-elastic scattering, has an extremely low energy threshold, making it highly sensitive to dark matter interactions. The ejected proton serves as a clear experimental signature, allowing for the detection of dark matter particles.
The proposed detectors are simple, technologically mature, and cost-effective, yet they could be significantly more sensitive than current dark matter detection experiments. Moreover, these detectors offer strong directionality, which can be utilized to efficiently reject background noise and improve the accuracy of dark matter detection.
The practical applications of this research for the energy sector are not immediately apparent, as the primary focus is on fundamental particle physics. However, a deeper understanding of dark matter and its interactions could potentially lead to new insights into the nature of dark energy, which plays a crucial role in the expansion of the universe. This, in turn, could have implications for our understanding of the cosmos and the fundamental forces that govern it. The research was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
This article is based on research available at arXiv.