IN 1977, physicist Frank Wilczek took a stroll that would change the course of particle physics perpetually. “On that walk, I had the germs of two really good ideas,” he remembers. The first was how a theoretical particle, later dubbed the Higgs boson, would possibly work together with different particles. This can be how the Higgs was discovered many years later. The second thought, nevertheless, has taken just a little longer to catch on.
Wilczek had imagined a approach that very mild – basically massless – particles could be made. He talked to his colleague, the late Steven Weinberg, who had been pondering alongside the identical strains. Together, they predicted a category of particles we now name axions.
Weinberg was optimistic, convincing Wilczek, now on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that axions can be straightforward to search out. But almost half a century later, we’re nonetheless wanting. In the intervening years, curiosity in axions – largely fuelled as a result of they could be the hard-to-find dark matter that makes up 85 per cent of the matter within the universe – dwindled in favour of different explanations.
Today, amid our failure to trace down dark matter and a slew of theoretical and experimental breakthroughs, axions are resurgent. “They’re very much back in fashion,” says Wilczek.
And now, there’s far more than the mysterious nature of dark matter up for grabs, as a result of axions provide an answer to an entire host of cosmological mysteries, together with the elusive dark power thought to drive the universe’s enlargement. They are, in brief, the particles that could solve the universe.…