Wednesday 18 July 2007

Detecting Dark Matter using Centrifuging Techniques

S. Mitra

saibalm@science.uva.nl

Instituut voor Theoretische Fysica Universiteit van Amsterdam 1018 XE Amsterdam The Netherlands

R. Foot
foot@physics.unimelb.edu.au

School of Physics Research Centre for High Energy Physics The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia January 2003

Abstract

A new and inexpensive technique for detecting self interacting dark matter in the form of small grains in bulk matter is proposed. Depending on the interactions with ordinary matter, dark matter grains in bulk matter may be isolated by using a centrifuge and using ordinary matter as a filter. The case of mirror matter interacting with ordinary matter via photon-mirror photon kinetic mixing provides a concrete example of this type of dark matter candidate. It is known that a large fraction of the mass of the universe is in the form of dark matter. Most of this dark matter is believed to exist in the form of as of yet unknown elementary particles. Many different types of candidates have been proposed, such as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), strongly interacting massive particles (SIMPS) and charged massive particles (CHAMPS). Despite many experimental searches all attempts to detect these particles have failed. For a review see. 

http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0301229.pdf