What equipment is required for dark matter research?
2 Answers
Dark matter research doesn't require specialist equipment.
Explanation:
Observations of how stars moved in galaxies produced a problem. The visible objects in the galaxy simply didn't have enough mass to explain the speeds stars were travelling. Unless our theory of gravity is wrong on a galactic scale there is a lot of invisible mass.
This invisible mass was called dark matter. It only interacts through gravity and possibly the weak force. Dark matter is only a theory. We don't know for certain whether it exists. If it does exist we don't know what it is.
The only way we can research dark matter is by observing the motions of stars using telescopes.
It is impossible to shield instruments from neutrinos. Neutrinos are everywhere and they normally pass through matter without interacting.
Axions are theoretical particles which have never been observed and may not exist.
I think the questioner was referring to the use of particle physics to find (putative) candidate particles that could satisfy the requirements of (cold) dark matter.
Explanation:
A google search “hunting for dark matter” returned many hits ... CERN has several pages devoted to it, there is a TED-ed video on it and a review of a novel technique here: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-dark_1.html
Philip E is quite correct in stating nothing has been found yet, and I’m no specialist to be able to state how they shield their equipment (indeed in many cases neutrinos and axions seem to be what they are looking for) but this is my contribution.
Happy hunting!
