Dark Matter Makes Gluons Glue Better

On Monday 21 August 2023 at the 52nd edition of the International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics in Gyongyos, Hungary in a session on cosmic ray and astroparticle physics, Science Synergy Chair of Science Noah Bray-Ali will give a talk on dark matter and the mass of the charged W weak vector boson. Created in high-energy collisions between hadrons at particle colliders, the W boson carries the nuclear force that makes the Sun shine and that warms the core of the Earth. Yet precision measurements of the mass of the W boson by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) colllaboration using proton-antiproton collisions created by the former Tevatron collider at the US Department of Energy Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) located outside Chicago disagree with predictions based on the Standard Model of particle physics.

**Little Hadron Collider on the Prairie–**The Tevatron (highlighted in red) was a proton-antiproton collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, Illinois. The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment measured the mass of the charged W weak vector bosons created by the annihilation of a quark from the proton and an anti-quark from the antiproton during the high-energy collision of hadron bunches in the interaction region within the detector.

“Dark matter shifts the W mass,” argues Science Chair Bray-Ali. “The luminous volume created by the colliding bunches of hadrons in the interaction region within the particle detector acts as a haloscope to sense dark matter from the local halo of the galaxy.” Using the nature of dark matter found by Science Synergy in April 2021 (See Dark Matter Makes Light Bend in the Lab), Bray-Ali calculated the size of the dark matter shift of the W mass. The results agree with the observations by the CDF collaboration and resolve the seven standard deviation discrepancy with the Standard Model announced in April 2022.

The mechanism for the dark matter shift of the W mass is analogous to the way that dark matter shifts the spin of the most stable form of strange matter known as muons (See Strange Matter Spins Surprisingly Fast). In particular, the size of the shift scales up with the luminous volume created during the hadron collisions by the intersecting bunches of particles within the high-energy beams. The luminous volume created inside the Collider Detector at Fermilab was significantly larger than the volume created inside the ATLAS detector at the European research organization CERN using the Large Hadron Collider, and this larger volume allowed the CDF team to more easily see the dark matter shift of the W boson mass than the ATLAS team though the dark matter effect is still visible in the ATLAS team’s results which were first reported in 2017 and were recently updated in March 2023.