On 7 October 2023 in Mayer Hall on the University of California at San Diego campus, Science Synergy Science Chair Noah Bray-Ali will give a talk about dark matter for the American Physical Society Far Western Section meeting.
“Dark matter is made of axions,” Science Chair Bray-Ali says. “The axion is a particle of matter that talks to light in the same way that light talks to normal matter: Dark matter makes light bend.”
The focus of the talk in San Diego is the light bending effect shown in the figure. The effect was first seen more than twenty years ago by the Muon g-2 experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory near New York City and was recently confirmed as the discovery of a new phenomenon by new runs of the experiment which is now at Fermi National Laboratory outside Chicago (See Strange Matter Spins Surprisingly Fast). The experiment used a beam of normal matter traveling at 99.94% of the speed of light around a donut-shaped superconducting magnet the size of the mid-field circle on a soccer pitch: It found a shift in the ability of light to bend the path of matter that has roughly the size expected from the bending of light by dark matter within the relatively large volume of space-time filled by the beam of matter during the experiment.