(VICE) – Scientists want to search for a hypothetical particle that can act as a portal to a warped fifth dimension that mediates the cosmic realms of light and dark. You would be forgiven for assuming that sentence is a science fiction synopsis, but it is actually the mind-boggling upshot of a recent study that seeks to illuminate some of the most persistent enigmas in science.
The existence of this speculative particle could “provide a natural explanation” for the abundance of dark matter, an unidentified substance that accounts for most of the universe’s mass, and resolve intractable problems about subatomic particles known as fermions, according to the new research, which was published last month in The European Physical Journal C.
The study adds that “the presence of new physics” can explain these fundamental mysteries by presenting a model of the universe with a fifth dimension that can be traversed by particles. The study was authored by Javier Castellano and Matthias Neubert, theoretical physicists at the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz,
and Adrián Carmona, an Athenea3i fellow at the department of theoretical physics and the cosmos at the University of Granada. “We have been working on a similar topic for quite some time,” said the team in an email. “Our initial motivation was to explain the possible origin of fermion masses in theories with a warped extra dimension.” “We knew that the masses of these constituents had some special features, which were crying out for an explanation,” they said. READ MORE
