What if dark matter changes the physics of condensed matter in a way that can be seen with high-confidence using readily available detectors and small quantities of familiar materials at room-temperature and ambient pressure in an above-ground experiment lasting about a month? Clearly, this changes everything, not just for dark matter but, more importantly, for condensed matter. In a paper submitted yesterday to Physical Review Letters, Science Synergy lays out the case for such an experiment in a straightforward way based on three well-established physical principles of electronically polarized systems: 1) Jahn-Teller effect in alkali-halide scintillators 2) Axion electrodynamics and 3) Lorentz transformation.
The figure shows the way that the dark state in the popular thallium-doped sodium iodide NaI(Tl) scintillator crystals looks to the dark matter axions at rest in the local cosmic microwave background (CMB) rest-frame: We see a square made of four iodine I 5p orbitals that point in towards a central thallium Tl 6s orbital. A static electric field, E, pointing radially outward, transfers the positively electrically charged “hole” in the Tl 6s shell of electrons — created by the soft x-rays and Auger-Meitner electrons released in the nuclear gamma-ray cascade following electron-capture by the nucleus of the rare radioactive potassium isotope K-40 within the crystal — to the dark state which has an equal probability, within its quantum wavefunction, to be found on each of the four I 5p orbitals in the Tl-I plane. With the velocity of the dark state coming out of the plane toward you — along the tetragonal axis of the Jahn-Teller distortion of the TlI6 octahedron created by the excitation of an electron from the T 6s shell to the Tl 6p shell with the orbital oriented out of the Tl-I plane (not shown) — this static electric field from the electronic polarization within the dark state Lorentz-transforms into a small static magnetic field whose direction winds counter-clock-wise with the same spatial pattern as the quantum wavefunction of the dark state and whose strength — proportional to the dark-state velocity — modulates sinusoidally throughout the year, with a minimum close to June 12, due to the combination of the annual orbital motion of the Earth within the Solar System and the secular flow of the Solar System within the CMB rest-frame — along with the rest of the Milky Way and the Local Group — toward the Virgo Cluster.
Dark matter from the local “halo” of the galaxy, in the form of quantum chromodynamic (QCD) axions with rest-mass energy around one-half of an electron-Volt (0.5 eV), at rest in the CMB rest-frame, couples to the static magnetic field created by the electronic polarization of the dark state in the alkali-halide NaI(Tl) scintillator and by the motion of the dark state within the local CMB rest-frame. This axion electrodynamic coupling converts the dark matter halo axions into a near-infrared electric field, oriented along the static magnetic field, having frequency, f, around 120 tera-Hertz (THz), that is set by the Planck constant, h, about 4.1 eV per THz, and by the dark matter rest-mass energy, mAc2, according to the quantum relationship: hf = mAc2. Finally, this near-infrared electric field resonates with the 130 THz activation frequency within the ~30 THz width of the resonance — and has the right spatial winding within the Tl-I plane — to bring the hole home from the dark state shared among the four in-plane I 5p orbitals back to the central Tl 6s shell, where the hole can recombine with the excited Tl 6p electron to make the scintillation light.