The everyday use of a GPS device might be to find your way around town or even navigate¹ a hiking trail, but for two physicists², the Global Positioning System might be a tool in directly detecting and measuring dark matter, so far an elusive³ but ubiquitous form of matter responsible for the formation of galaxies⁴. Andrei Derevianko, of the University of Nevada, Reno, and his colleague Maxim⁵ Pospelov, of the University of Victoria and the Perimeter⁶ Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, have proposed a method for a dark-matter search with GPS satellites and other atomic clock networks that compares times from the clocks and looks for discrepancies⁷.

 

"Despite solid observational evidence for the existence of dark matter, its nature remains⁸ a mystery," Derevianko, a professor in the College of Science at the University, said. "Some research programs in particle physics assume that dark matter is composed of heavy-particle-like matter. This assumption may not hold true, and significant interest exists for alternatives."

 

"Modern physics and cosmology fail dramatically in that they can only explain 5 percent of mass and energy in the universe in the form of ordinary matter, but the rest is a mystery."

 

There is evidence that dark energy is about 68 percent of the mystery mass and energy. The remaining 27 percent is generally acknowledged to be dark matter, even though it is not visible and eludes⁹ direct detection and measurement.

 

"Our research pursues the idea that dark matter may be organized as a large gas-like collection of topological defects, or energy cracks," Derevianko said. "We propose to detect the defects, the dark matter, as they sweep through us with a network of sensitive atomic clocks. The idea is, where the clocks go out of synchronization¹⁰, we would know that dark matter, the topological defect, has passed by. In fact, we envision using the GPS constellation¹¹ as the largest human-built dark-matter detector¹²."

 

Their research was well-received by the scientific community when the theory was presented at scientific conferences this year, and their paper on the topic appears today in the online version of the scientific journal Nature Physics, ahead of the print version.

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