We can use ordinary sugar in the search for dark matter

Scientists have come up with a new way to search for dark matter using giant crystals of sucrose, or table sugar—though so far they've found only a bittersweet lack of results.

We believe that dark matter exists based on strange gravitational attraction it appears to have an effect on galaxies, but despite decades of searching for possible dark matter particles, scientists have found nothing. Many of these searches have been aimed at searching for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which have long been considered among the most promising candidates for dark matter. But even the most sensitive search queries came empty-handed.

Most WIMP detectors look for the flashes of light that a passing dark matter particle might produce when interacting with ordinary matter, but the particles are assumed to be quite large, about 2 to 10,000 times the mass of a proton. This is what most clearly explains the galactic effects of dark matter, but it is also possible that WIMPs are lighter, although this fits the hypothesis less well.

Now, Federica Petricca from the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, and her colleagues looked for these lighter WIMPs using a detector made from sugar crystals cooled to extreme temperatures.

Very light WIMPs should obviously interact with very light atoms such as hydrogen, but using pure hydrogen as a detector is difficult due to its low density, which reduces the likelihood of interaction. However, sucrose contains 22 hydrogen atoms in each molecule, which has a much higher density than pure hydrogen.

Petricca and her team first grew sucrose crystals from a concentrated sugar solution over the course of a week, and then lowered the temperature of the crystals to seven thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. They then observed possible dark matter interactions by monitoring tiny increases in heat with an ultra-sensitive thermometer and flashes of light with a photon sensor.

The researchers ran their experiment for 19 hours, and while the sugar crystals did glow at levels consistent with larger particles, they did not detect the weaker signals that might have been produced by a WIMP.

The sugar crystals were created to search for possible dark matter interactions with amazing sensitivity, scientists say. Carlos Blanco at Pennsylvania State University, and they could allow researchers to see the extremely low returns from light WIMPs. However, it is unclear whether the experiment can effectively rule out other possible sources of crystal illumination, such as radioactive carbon-14, which is commonly found in many sugars.

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