IN 1977, physicist Frank Wilczek took a stroll that may change the course of particle physics endlessly. “On that walk, I had the germs of two really good ideas,” he remembers. The primary was how a theoretical particle, later dubbed the Higgs boson, may work together with different particles. This might be how the Higgs was found decades later. The second concept, nonetheless, has taken just a little longer to catch on.
Wilczek had imagined a means that very mild – basically massless – particles may very well be made. He talked to his colleague, the late Steven Weinberg, who had been pondering alongside the identical traces. Collectively, they predicted a category of particles we now name axions.
Weinberg was optimistic, convincing Wilczek, now on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, that axions can be straightforward to search out. However almost half a century later, we’re nonetheless wanting. Within the intervening years, curiosity in axions – largely fuelled as a result of they may very well be the hard-to-find dark matter that makes up 85 per cent of the matter within the universe – dwindled in favour of different explanations.
At present, amid our failure to trace down darkish matter and a slew of theoretical and experimental breakthroughs, axions are resurgent. “They’re very much back in fashion,” says Wilczek.
And now, there may be way over the mysterious nature of darkish matter up for grabs, as a result of axions provide an answer to an entire host of cosmological mysteries, together with the elusive dark energy thought to drive the universe’s enlargement. They’re, briefly, the particles that might remedy the universe.…
