How Giant Atoms Can Help To Unlock The Secrets Of Dark Matter?
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The universe is known to be astonishingly secretive place where mysterious substances are known as dark matter.
The dark matter exists due to gravitational pull of galaxy clusters - the matter which we can see in a cluster is not just enough to hold it together by gravity. So there must be some extra materials there which are made up by unknown particles that aren't visible to us.
Scientists are researching on what these unknown particles are, and how they can affect the ordinary matter we see around us. It interacts only weekly with normal matter at best, and a new way to probe dark matter that may just prove successful is by using atoms that have been stretched to be 4,000 times larger than usual, according to theconversation.
The existence of atoms was presented by John Dalton in early 1800s.Then JJ Thomson and Ernest Rutherford discovered that atoms consist of electrons and a nucleus. Thereafter, Erwin Schrödinger described the atom mathematically by using quantum theory. This invention has been used to create new technologies, like lasers and atomic clocks.
However the amount of energy transferred is very small, so a special kind of atom is necessary to make the interaction relevant. Therefore this worked out done is called as "Rydberg atom". This atom contains long distances between the electron and the nucleus, meaning they possess high potential energy.
According to the laws of quantum mechanics, there needs a certain minimum energy transfer for producing light. In this method there is a problem, the dark matter particle has to be big enough if we want to detect it in this way. Axion is a hypothetical particle that is a strong candidate for dark matter.
Also, beyond dark matter we are aiming for the detection of gravitational waves, a long time ago ripples in the fabric of space is predicted by Einstein.