Next week in Anaheim, California the American Physical Society will merge its two major annual meetings — the March meeting focused on the physics of materials and devices and the April meeting focused on high-energy physics of fundamental particles — into one big Global Physics Summit. On Tuesday 18 March at 3pm in General Physics Session I of the APS meeting, Science Synergy Science Chair Dr. Noah Bray-Ali will give a talk on the determination to 44 parts per million precision of the rest-mass energy of the particles that form the dark matter in the universe. The talk is based on infrared spectroscopy of the common plastic material polystyrene done by Science Synergy in April 2024 (See Exciting Dark Matter in Plastic with Infrared Light).
“Understanding the nature of dark matter is one of the biggest challenges in physics today,” says Prof. Hugh Lippincott, an experimental particle physicist based at the University of California at Santa Barbara who will give a talk at the meeting reviewing the past forty years of failed dark matter searches including several in which he was an active participant. Yet, the nature of dark matter was revealed by Science Synergy in August 2021. Dark matter is made of particles known as axions that make light bend in the lab (See Dark Matter Makes Light Bend in the Lab).
“Solving the dark matter mystery will be an epochal moment in humankind’s quest to understand the universe,” says Prof. Katherine Freese, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the popular book The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter (Princeton University Press, 2014) who will give a public lecture at the meeting that reviews the past forty years of failed dark matter theories including several of which she was an active proponent. Indeed, the solution of the dark matter mystery by Science Synergy in August 2021 has lead to a new epoch. The discovery of room-temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure, for example, is among the new phenomena whose nature becomes clearer in light of the new understanding of the nature of dark matter (See Dark Matter Makes Bone Like Mineral Float in Magnet).