We can use regular sugar to search for dark matter

Scientists have devised a new way to search for dark matter using giant crystals of sucrose, or table sugar, although so far they have only found a bitter-sweet taste due to a lack of results.

We believe dark matter exists based on the strange gravitational force it seems to exert on galaxies, but despite decades of searching for potential dark matter particles, scientists have found none. Many of these searches looked for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which have long been thought to be among the most promising candidates for dark matter. But even the most sensitive searches came up empty-handed.

Most WIMP detectors look for flashes of light that a passing dark matter particle might produce when it interacts with ordinary matter, but this assumes the particles are large enough, about 2 to 10,000 times the mass of a proton. This explains the galactic influences of dark matter most clearly, but it is also possible that weakly interacting particles (WIMPs) are lighter, although this fits more critically with the hypothesis.

now, Federica Petrica She and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany searched for these lighter particles using a detector made of sugar crystals cooled to extreme temperatures.

Very light weakly interacting particles (WIMPs) should interact visibly with very light atoms, such as hydrogen, but using pure hydrogen as a reagent is difficult due to its low density, which reduces the chances of interaction. However, sucrose contains 22 hydrogen atoms per molecule, a density much higher than that of pure hydrogen.

Petrica and her team first grew sucrose crystals from a concentrated sugar solution over the course of a week, before lowering the temperature of the crystals to seven thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. They then monitored possible dark matter interactions by looking for slight increases in heat, using an ultra-sensitive thermometer, and flashes of light, using a photon sensor.

The researchers ran their experiment for 19 hours, and although the sugar crystals lit up at levels consistent with larger particles, they did not measure any weaker detections that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) could produce.

He says the sugar crystals were set up to search for potential dark matter interactions with remarkable sensitivity Carlos Blanco At Pennsylvania State University, they can allow researchers to see very small bounces of light weakly interacting particles (WIMPs). However, it is not clear whether the experiment is able to rule out other potential sources that effectively light up the crystals, such as radioactive carbon-14 that is commonly found in polysaccharides.

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