About three years ago, Wolfgang “Wolli” Mittig and Yassid Ayyad went looking for the lost mass of the universe, well known as dark matter, at the center of the atom.
Wolfgangmitig, a prominent professor of MSU Hannah and a faculty member of the Rare Isotope Beam Facility
Their expedition did not lead them to dark matter, but they still found something they had never seen before, something that was unexplained. Well, at least an explanation that everyone can agree on.
“It was like a detective story,” he said. MitigHannah, a prominent professor at Michigan State University Department of Physics and Astronomy Rare isotope beam facility faculty member, or FRIB..
“We started looking for dark matter, but couldn’t find it,” he said. “Instead, I found something else that was difficult to explain in theory.”
So the team went back to work, did more experiments, and gathered more evidence to make the discovery meaningful. Mittig, Ayyad and his colleagues upheld their proceedings at the National Institute of Superconducting Cyclotrons (NSCL) at Michigan State University.
The team working at NSCL found a new way to an unexpected destination. This is explained in detail in the journal on June 28th. Physical review letter.. In doing so, they also revealed an interesting physics in the microscopic quantum domain of subatomic particles.
In particular, the team found that even if the core or nucleus of an atom is filled with neutrons, it can find a way to a more stable composition by spitting out protons instead.
Guess
This Hubble Space Telescope image revolves around what is known as the Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxy (blue), surrounded by the more familiar galaxies (yellow). Astrophysics believes that more than 95% of the matter found in the LSB is dark matter. Credits: ESA / Hubble & NASA, D. Calzetti
Dark matter is one of the most famous of the universe we don’t know most about. For decades, scientists have known that the universe contains more mass than can be seen based on the orbits of stars and galaxies.
In order for gravity to keep celestial bodies in their path, they had to have an invisible mass and a lot of it — 6 of the usual substances we can observe, measure, and characterize. Double the amount. Scientists are convinced that dark matter is there, but they have not yet devised a way to find it and detect it directly.
Ayyad, a nuclear physics researcher at the Galician Institute for High Energy Physics (IGFAE) at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, said:
Approximately, scientists have begun about 100 experiments to try to figure out exactly what dark matter is, Mitig said.
“None has been successful after 20, 30, or 40 years of research,” he said.
Yassid Ayyad holds the components used in the research team’s 2019 experiments while serving as a physicist for detector systems at the National Institute of Superconducting Cyclotrons.
“But there was a very hypothetical idea that we could observe dark matter with a very special type of nucleus,” said Ayyad, a former NSCL detector system physicist.
This theory focused on what it calls a dark decay. We hypothesized that certain unstable nuclei, that is, naturally decaying nuclei, could litter dark matter when they decay.
So Ayyad, Mittig and his team, knowing that the odds were against them, designed an experiment that could look for a dark collapse. However, gambling wasn’t as big as it seemed, because by investigating exotic collapses, researchers can better understand the rules and structures of the nuclear and quantum worlds.
Researchers had a good chance to discover something new. The question was what would happen.
Help from Hello
When people imagine nuclei, many may think of a rugged ball made of protons and neutrons, Ayyad said. However, nuclei can take strange shapes, including what is known as halo nuclei.
Beryllium-11 is an example of a halo nucleus.Form, or isotopeOf the element beryllium, which has four protons and seven neutrons in its nucleus. Holds 10 of the 11 nuclear particles in a dense central cluster. But one neutron floats far away from its nucleus, like the moon ringing around the Earth, loosely bound to the rest of the nucleus, Ayyad said.
In a team experiment announced in 2019, beryllium-11 decays due to beta decay, becoming excited to boron-11 and decaying to beryllium-10 and protons. In a new experiment, the team will access the boron-11 state by adding protons to beryllium-10, that is, by performing a time-reversal reaction.
Beryllium-11 is also unstable. After a lifespan of about 13.8 seconds, it is destroyed by what is known as beta decay. One of the neutrons emits an electron and becomes a proton. This transforms the nucleus into boron-11, a stable form of elemental boron with 5 protons and 6 neutrons.
However, according to its very hypothetical theory, beryllium-11 can follow a completely different path if the decaying neutrons are in the halo. It can undergo a dark collapse.
In 2019, researchers began experiments at TRIUMF, Canada’s national particle accelerator facility, looking for its highly virtual collapse. And they found a collapse with an unexpectedly high probability, but it wasn’t a dark collapse.
The loosely bound neutrons of beryllium-11 appeared to emit electrons like normal beta decay, but beryllium did not follow a known decay path to boron.
The team hypothesized that if the state of boron-11 exists as a gateway to another decay to beryllium-10 and protons, it could explain the likelihood of decay. For those who maintain the score, it meant that the nucleus was beryllium again. Only now it had 6 neutrons instead of 7.
“This happens only because of the halo nucleus,” Ayyad said. “This is a very exotic type of radioactivity. This was, in fact, the first direct evidence of proton radioactivity from neutron-rich nuclei.”
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