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Asked by to Thomas, Simon, Clara, Becky on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Clara Nellist answered on 13 Mar 2014:
We hope so! This is one of the big questions that we’re hoping to answer at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Some people think that dark matter might be made up of new particles that we haven’t seen yet. If they’re really heavy then it will take a lot of energy to make them, which is why we haven’t made them so far in any of our other experiments. The LHC will be running at a higher energy than before when it turns back on again at the end of this year (it’s currently being upgraded).
But the problem is that these new particles probably won’t hang around very long and they’ll change into ordinary lighter particles. We use our detectors, which are like huge particle cameras, to look at these other particles and try to work out what they came from. Imagine a huge jigsaw puzzle that you have to do thousands and thousands of times before the picture becomes clear. That’s why it take several years understand the data we get from the LHC.
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Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 13 Mar 2014:
There are many form of dark matter and may ways to try to approach it. Beyond what Clara presented at the LHC, there are also searches in space, such as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which was built at CERN and is now on the International Space Station.
There are also theories that predict that dark matter might interact with things on Earth, such as Ar at the bottom of the ocean. This is a possibility that my research might be able to address.
In all those cases, though, we are talking about such weak effects that they are barely accessible and you need to really look for a long time and hope that there is something to be found!
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Simon Albright answered on 13 Mar 2014:
At some point it certainly will be (if it exists). The problem is that there are quite a few options for what it might be and every option has a different detection method. The best we can do is look at what our equations tell us and design experiments appropriately.
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