Dark matter is most of the stuff in the universe. The strong nuclear force is the strongest force in nature. When the two get together, sparks fly. Ten days ago on 17 September 2024 at CERN, the European center for nuclear research, Josh Bendavid from MIT gave a talk that reveals the way that dark matter shifts the strong force.
“The Standard Model [of particle physics] is not dead,” Bendavid declared. In April 2022 a team of researchers based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory — known as Fermilab — in Batavia, Illinois had announced a shift in the strength of the strong nuclear force caused by dark matter (See Dark Matter Makes Gluons Glue Better). Speaking on behalf of a team based at CERN, Bendavid explained that his team’s measurements land on top of the prediction based on the standard model of particle physics. In fact, the CERN and Fermilab results differ by more than the conventional “five standard deviation” threshold for the discovery of a new phenomenon in high-energy particle physics.
In an analysis submitted on 24 September 2024 to the Journal for High Energy Physics, Science Synergy Science Chair Noah Bray-Ali resolves the tension between the Fermilab and CERN measurements. “At the interaction point within the particle detector,” Bray-Ali explains, “the pair of colliding particle bunches makes a luminous volume that catches dark matter from the local dark matter halo of the galaxy.” The shift of the strong force by dark matter scales up with the size of this luminous volume, Bray-Ali argues. Using publicly available estimates of the particle bunch length and beam radius at the interaction points within the two experiments compiled by the Particle Data Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Bray-Ali calculated the size of the dark matter shift of the strong force for both the Fermilab and CERN measurements. The difference in the size of the luminous volume gives rise to the observed difference in the size of the dark matter shifts of the strong force between the measurements. The pleasing agreement between the observations and the simple scaling argument confirms the nature of dark matter proposed in August 2021 by Science Synergy (See Making Dark Matter in the Big Bang).