• The search for dark matter is the sole obsession of many scientists and laboratories around the world.
• While some laboratories search the stars or probe deep underground, a new technique will try to find evidence of dark matter collisions in ancient Earth rocks.
• A new laboratory at Virginia Tech will work with specialized microbiology imaging technology at the University of Zurich to try to identify crystal “destruction” caused by dark matter effects.

The search for dark matter is an all-encompassing one, and ultimately it’s understandable. 85 percent of reality It’s made up of things and you’ve never seen it. That’s a fair reason to worry about finding it as quickly as possible. Scientists investigated stars in their research. potentially high axial concentrations (a leading dark matter candidate), Elusive particle in Earth’s atmosphereand even Dug deep into the ground In search of any clues. Now scientists from Virginia Tech and other international universities are pioneering another type of research focused on the decidedly low-tech: really old rocks.

After receiving $3.5 million from the National Science Foundation (as well as additional funds from the National Nuclear Security Administration), Virginia Tech’s Patrick Huber and his team are building a new laboratory to test the new dark matter theory. As the name suggests, dark matter It is currently undetectable by modern science because it is believed to be a weakly interacting particle. But there is a huge amount indirect evidence pointing to the existenceLike the Cosmic Microwave Background and the rotation of the galaxy.

This is not a direct observation of dark matter, but it is a very strong clue that these theoretical particles exist. While there are competing theories trying to explain dark matter (Modified Newtonian dynamics, etc.), dark matter and dark energy are still the best theories We are trying to explain the events we see in the universe.

So where exactly do ancient rocks come into play? As a dark matter detector, Earth has one important feature: It is very old. It is highly likely that over 4.6 billion years ancient rocks interacted with dark matter, changing their crystal structure. Huber and his team set out to find evidence of these events from long ago. atomic changes.

But Huber admits the idea is ambitious. “This is crazy” he said in a press release announces the project. “When I first heard this idea, I thought; This is so crazy. I want to do this. Other people in midlife crisis might take a mistress or buy a sports car. I have one lab.”

These “miniature destruction scars,” as the researchers call them, result from high-energy particles inside a nucleus bouncing off the nucleus. sourceThis dislodges the core. The resulting gap leaves permanent changes in the rock’s crystal lattice, which Huber’s group hopes to identify.

“We’ll take some crystal “This is a result of exposure to different particles over millions of years and extracting distributions corresponding to things we know,” researcher Vsevolod Ivanov of the National Security Institute at Virginia Tech said in a press release. “Everything that remains must be something new, and that could be dark matter.”

To track these dark matter signatures, the team is partnering with the University of Zurich to leverage microbiology imaging technology often used to map the nervous systems of animals to possibly detect high-energy particle signatures in rock. The entire experimental process is still being worked out, but this new laboratory will undoubtedly provide another exciting method for detection. the universe The most important particle.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about science fiction and how our world works. If you look hard enough you can find his previous works on Gizmodo and Paste.