Photo: sciencealert.com/sakkmesterke

Alex Bowser

Astronomers have come to the conclusion in the 80s that the universe and most of its mass are actually invisible, hence the name “dark matter.” This dark matter is theorized to be the glue of the universe that holds galaxies together, something that experts have attempted to prove since.

Theoretical physicists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz who work in the PRISMA Cluster of Excellence have been working on a way to be able to use the fifth dimension in order to test the dark matter theory.

Previously, scientists have been bound by the inability to enter into an extra dimension in spacetime, which is also why dark matter is theorized to operate in the fifth dimension. In the 1920s, it was speculated by Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein that the fifth dimension would have to be too small for the human eye to see.

This speculation was later reopened to interpretation and attempted studies in the late 90s when it was realized that the presence of a fifth dimension could answer some long-theorized questions in particle physics. 

Mattias Neubert, a professor who previously worked at Cornell University at the time, along with Yuval Grossman of Stanford University, showed that using the Standard Model of particle physics in a fifth dimensional spacetime could explain the strange and unusual patterns of elementary particles.

Now, 20 years later, Professor Neubert works at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and collaborates with the spokesperson of the PRIMA Cluster of Excellence. Neubert’s team has now discovered that fifth dimensional equations have predicted a new particle that is related to the structure of the Higgs boson, but much heavier.

This particle currently cannot be produced because of its heavy mass, not even at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, the highest-energy particle collider in the world.

Another paper recently published had shown that researchers discovered that this particle could potentially mediate a new force that can exist between our visible and well-known elementary particles and new mysterious matter from the dark sector.

In short, it’s theorized that using this newly-found particle, though cannot be created yet, could potentially allow us to detour through the fifth dimension. The significance of all this lies within more than just the confirmation of dark matter, but can possibly also answer questions about how our universe was made when the dark matter was produced.

“After years of searching for possible confirmations of our theoretical predictions, we are now confident that the mechanism we have discovered would make dark matter accessible to forthcoming experiments,” Professor Neubert said in a recent statement, “because the properties of the new interaction between ordinary matter and dark matter – which is mediated by our proposed particle – can be calculated accurately within our theory.”