Thursday, March 18, 2010

Fake Dark Matter Could Show What Real Stuff Is Like

Can you see it yet? (Image: NASA, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA)

From New Scientist:

The key to understanding dark matter is in our grasp – we've got something here on Earth that works just the same way.

Dark matter is hypothetical, invisible stuff that cosmologists invoke to explain why the universe appears to contain much less matter than their calculations say it should, and some think that it is made up of hypothetical particles called axions. Even though we haven't yet found a genuine axion, however, materials called topological insulators can be used to mimic them, say Shoucheng Zhang and colleagues at Stanford University, California. Magnetic fluctuations in the materials produce a field just like an axion field, his team found.

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