Levels of Education

[Jackalope]

Ah, very exciting, and such a lovely mess of exclusions and maybe signals!

I'm fairly confident there is no signal. DAMA and CoGENT just have to deal with it. I'm also semi-confident that dark matter is not a WIMP.

Care to speculate on what you think it might be?

[Alex K]

I'm fairly confident there is no signal. DAMA and CoGENT just have to deal with it. I'm also semi-confident that dark matter is not a WIMP.

Care to speculate on what you think it might be?

I'm a bit of an Axion guy as of late, and what does the wimp expert say?

[Surgenator]

Care to speculate on what you think it might be?

I'm a bit of an Axion guy as of late.

I'm partial to either axioms or sterile neutrinos.

[Alex K]

I'm a bit of an Axion guy as of late.

I'm partial to either axioms or sterile neutrinos.

The chances for detection are probably pretty lousy for the latter, eh?

[Surgenator]

I'm partial to either axioms or sterile neutrinos.

The chances for detection are probably pretty lousy for the latter, eh?

Not necessarily. Your correct that the cross section for sterile neutrino's is very small. There is still hope. If you can measure the neutrino flux from a nuclear reactor, you can compare the total flux very near to the reactor to one farther away. A decrease in total flux would mean that some of the known neutrinos oscillated to a sterile neutrino. This is of course not a direct detection, but this would be possible with our current technology.

[The Valkyrie]

The chances for detection are probably pretty lousy for the latter, eh?

Not necessarily. Your correct that the cross section for sterile neutrino's is very small. There is still hope. If you can measure the neutrino flux from a nuclear reactor, you can compare the total flux very near to the reactor to one farther away. A decrease in total flux would mean that some of the known neutrinos oscillated to a sterile neutrino. This is of course not a direct detection, but this would be possible with our current technology.

*Beccs backs slowly out of thread*

[Surgenator]

*Beccs backs slowly out of thread*

Friendly warning. Never be in the same room as two or more physicist if you don't want to hear about physics.

[The Valkyrie]

*Beccs backs slowly out of thread*

Friendly warning. Never be in the same room as two or more physicist if you don't want to hear about physics.

THe same is true for surgeons - especially, it seems, cardiac surgeons. Not only do we talk about things that might confuse people (the same way physics confuses the hell out of me), but also some people nearby have turned green - figuratively.

Had one dry retching once.

[Alex K]

Friendly warning. Never be in the same room as two or more physicist if you don't want to hear about physics.

THe same is true for surgeons - especially, it seems, cardiac surgeons. Not only do we talk about things that might confuse people (the same way physics confuses the hell out of me), but also some people nearby have turned green - figuratively.

Had one dry retching once.

Never happened to me with physics, although my audience may have come close on occasion.

Concerning the medical retching, I did my military ersatz service thing driving an ambulance/as a paramedic assistant. Try me

But to keep you in the thread, we were merely mentioning some popular theoretical hypothesee which kind of hypothetical particles dark matter could be made out of. One idea is that there could be additional particles like the neutrinos, which are notoriously hard to detect because they interact so weakly with matter that they can traverse the entire earth without most of them even noticing. These new neutrinos might interact with matter even less than the known three types, and only with other neutrinos. You can imagine that it is not trivial to find such animals in the lab, because after all, all our experiments are made out of matter, and if they don't interact with normal matter directly, they are hard to make and see. This would be bad news for our chances to learn about the nature of dark matter if nature is like this. One can make conventional neutrinos in a reactor though and detect (a minuscule percentage of) those , and if they turn into this new even more invisible type of particle inmid flight as one would actually expect, one might see that indirectly because one sees less conventional neutrinos than expected coming from the reactor. Surgenator, is that roughly correct?