NIST’s Quantum Crystal Could Be a New Dark Matter Sensor | Hacker News Reader

NIST’s Quantum Crystal Could Be a New Dark Matter Sensor

nist.gov

71 pointsgeox10 comments

It is a shame that you can hardly get support for this kind of work without citing a shibboleth like "dark matter".

It would be better to build the thing to see what surprises it reveals. A remarkably large fraction of Nobel prizes come from inventing a new measurement method and then discovering a previously unsuspected phenomenon. So, we appreciate such discoveries after the fact, but cannot seem to support the kind of work that tends to evoke them, except by accident.

I think the idea in general is interesting for future developments. A lot of physical principles are either derived from or produce very accurate measurements done with simple hardware. If timebases can go in that direction it will make a lot of interesting portable science possible.

You already see this with the digitization of analysis. A couple hundred MHz digital system can be very accurate.

So true.

Apart from finding dark matter, what other applications would this sensor have? Would it be good for looking for submarines? Could you use it to detect buried electrical cables (for example 2m or more under the street?)

Anyone with more knowledge than me care to comment on veracity of this?

Thanks in advance!

No idea about the veracity of it, but it sounds almost like it's a dark matter/gravitational analogue to the piezo electric effect. That's a very interesting idea, it'd create a signal from a dark matter partical (assuming they are particals) interacting gravitationally and disrupting the crystal temporarily.

There's not much to verify there. They claim they got a way to use electromagnetic time crystals as an electromagnetic sensor. It's not an extraordinary claim, but they don't exactly say how either, so we can't check.

And if they improve their sensor into something that seems viable, it would be good at detecting the minuscule fields that some candidate dark matter particles should create very rarely when they interact with something. Maybe becoming a better detector for them than the current state of the art (this, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion_Dark_Matter_Experiment).

The keyword you want to look for is 'ultra light bosonic dark matter'. This search is legit.

This paper will send you almost in the right direction. The coupling is different, but the rest of the physics is the same: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.06165

So, you could probably call this a “dark crystal”

Is this like a Rick and Morty Quantum crystal?

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