This is a transcript of Episode 4 of The Conversation Weekly: Leaving Hong Kong after China’s clampdown: where are people thinking of going and why?. In this week’s episode, three experts explain why more people are thinking of leaving Hong Kong – and the choices they face about where to go. And we hear about new research that has found a new way to speed up the search for that elusive enigma: dark matter.
NOTE: Transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dan Merino: Hello and welcome to The Conversation Weekly.
Gemma Ware: In this episode, three experts explain why people are leaving Hong Kong, where they’re going and why.
Large galaxy clusters contain both dark and normal matter. The immense gravity of all this material warps the space around the cluster, causing the light from objects located behind the cluster to be distorted and magnified. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing. NASA/ESA
Nearly a century after dark matter was first proposed to explain the motion of galaxy clusters, physicists still have no idea what it s made of.
Researchers around the world have built dozens of detectors in hopes of discovering dark matter. As a graduate student, I helped design and operate one of these detectors, aptly named HAYSTAC (Haloscope At Yale Sensitive To Axion CDM). But despite decades of experimental effort, scientists have yet to identify the dark matter particle.
Credit: Steven Burrows
For nearly a century, scientists have worked to unravel the mystery of dark matter an elusive substance that spreads through the universe and likely makes up much of its mass, but has so far proven impossible to detect in experiments. Now, a team of researchers have used an innovative technique called quantum squeezing to dramatically speed up the search for one candidate for dark matter in the lab.
The findings, published today in the journal
Nature, center on an incredibly lightweight and as-of-yet undiscovered particle called the axion. According to theory, axions are likely billions to trillions of times smaller than electrons and may have been created during the Big Bang in humungous numbers enough to potentially explain the existence of dark matter.
By Jim Shelton
February 10, 2021
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Former Yale postdoc Danielle Speller, who is now as assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, documents the process of detector assembly. (Credit: Sid Cahn)
The search for dark matter the invisible glue that binds the cosmos and makes up most of the mass of galaxies is a bit like looking for a needle in a near-infinite haystack.
For one thing, scientists don’t know exactly what dark matter is. They are only able to infer its existence based on the gravitational pull it has on visible matter.
Nearly a century after dark matter was first proposed to explain the motion of galaxy clusters, physicists still have no idea what it’s made of.
Researchers around the world have built dozens of detectors in hopes of discovering dark matter. As a graduate student, I helped design and operate one of these detectors, aptly named HAYSTAC. But despite decades of experimental effort, scientists have yet to identify the dark matter particle.
Now, the search for dark matter has received an unlikely assist from technology used in quantum computing research. In a new paper published in the journal Nature, my colleagues on the HAYSTAC team and I describe how we used a bit of quantum trickery to double the rate at which our detector can search for dark matter. Our result adds a much-needed speed boost to the hunt for this mysterious particle.