Latest news with #darkmatter
CBS News
3 days ago
- Science
- CBS News
Future Leaders winner is a young Coloradan searching for the secrets of the universe
Throughout the school year, CBS Colorado along with our partners, Chevron and Colorado School of Mines, celebrate high school students excelling in science, technology, engineering and math, STEM. The Future Leaders Award comes with $1,000 and a profile on CBS News Colorado. CBS Julia Gao is the latest Future Leaders winner. She's a rising junior at Fairview High School in Boulder. Beyond a tough schedule of Advanced Placement classes, Gao is doing internships with have her working on the college level. "I really like everything about space," she told CBS News Colorado. She works to preserve the light that we can see in space. "I joined Dark Sky to work on night sky conservation efforts and to minimize light pollution where we can so we can preserve the stars," Gao explained. She also revels in the mysteries of space. "One thing that I was really interested in was dark matter, which makes up 70% of our universe, but we don't know anything about its composition," she said. Through an internship at Colorado State University, Gao is working among the physicists who are searching for the sterile neutrino, which could explain dark matter. A neutrino is the most basic subatomic particle from which all things are made. "It basically carries no charge and very minimal mass so it's very hard to find. But, if we do find the sterile neutrino that could be evidence that our understanding of the standard model, which is the model for all subatomic particles is incomplete," she said. Gao is writing a computer program that uses machine learning to look for the signs of the sterile neutrino in images taken by a subatomic particle detector. "It's a really great honor to be part of such a big important global collaboration, and I'm glad to be doing my part," Gao said. In the summer of 2024, in a lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, Gao worked on a study of how oxidative stress impacts brain cells and leads to cancer. Oxidative stress is an imbalance in the body where there are too many unstable molecules called free radicals and not enough antioxidants to neutralize them. "So I was studying different types of biomarkers for oxidative stress and by looking at those biomarkers on MRI scans it could help doctors in the future diagnose brain cancer earlier," Gao told First Alert Meteorologist Lauren Whitney. CBS In addition to these amazing internships, Gao is president of her school's chapter of Mu Alpha Theta, a national math honor society. She's a member of her school's chapter of the Science National Honor Society, and she competes on her school's Science Bowl Team. "You are involved in a lot of things, so why get involved in these particular activities?" Whitney asked. "Because there are a lot of just straight up science clubs or ways to do science, but when you can combine that with helping the people around you, I think that's really impactful," Gao replied. In the 2025-26 school year, Gao and her friend will organize the first Mustang Math Tournament in Colorado. Mustang Math is a national organization that does tournament math competitions for middle school students. Gao hopes to recruit 100 middle school students to participate. "I hope we can inspire middle schoolers to keep pursuing math and not be as daunted," she explained. She also plans to continue her own research in physics and trying to unlock the mysteries of the universe. LINK: Future Leaders CBS Colorado, Chevron, and Colorado School of Mines accept nominations and pick Future Leaders winners from September to April every year.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Dark matter may escape, but dark photons can't. Here's how MADMAX could catch them
Everything we visualize about space, including stars, planets, gases, and even galaxies, make up just a small fraction of the universe's total mass. The rest is invisible, silent, and frustratingly elusive, famously known as dark matter. Scientists have tried numerous ways to catch this mysterious form of matter, but it has managed to allude researchers almost every time. However, the latest results from MADMAX (MAgnetized Disc and Mirror Axion eXperiment) suggest we're closer than ever to detecting dark matter. MADMAX is a special setup that focuses on detecting axions and dark photons, two supposed particles that are believed to form the dark matter. "These two hypothetical particles are popular candidates for what dark matter might consist of. In our recent paper, we describe the results of a search for dark photons using a small-scale prototype," Jacob Mathias Egge, first author of the study, and a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg, said. The challenge of detecting dark matter is not just that it is invisible—rather that it interacts so weakly with normal matter that we might never notice it unless we build incredibly sensitive instruments. Traditional detectors have mostly come up empty-handed, especially when looking for heavier, slow-moving dark matter particles. That's why scientists have been turning their attention to lighter, more ghost-like particles like axions and dark photons. MADMAX tackles this challenge with a clever setup. The main highlight of its design is a dielectric haloscope, a kind of detector that uses special materials and mirrors to amplify the tiny signals that dark matter particles might produce. The MADMAX prototype uses three round discs made of sapphire, a pure and insulating material known for its excellent properties at high frequencies. These discs are spaced carefully in front of a mirror. If dark photons exist, they might occasionally transform into ordinary photons (particles of light) when passing through materials with the right properties. The layered discs and the mirror are arranged so that this transformation is amplified at specific frequencies, similar to how tuning a radio to the right station turns a faint signal into a clear one. Any resulting microwave photons from this process are then directed into a horn antenna, where an ultra-sensitive receiver tries to detect them. 'In our case, we tried to detect these excess photons with a frequency around 20 GHz," Egge said. Although the researchers did not find a signal, they were able to rule out the presence of dark photons in this mass range at an unprecedented level of sensitivity, many many times better than previous efforts at similar frequencies. "This is the first physics result from a MADMAX prototype and exceeds previous constraints on χ in this mass range by up to almost three orders of magnitude," the study authors note. What makes this result especially exciting is that the MADMAX team has now proven that their approach works. This is the first time a prototype like this has been successfully used to probe dark photons, and it delivered impressive results. "Since the core detector concept has now been proven to work, we can now easily expand our reach in the next upgraded iterations, increasing our chances of a detection," Egge added. The biggest upgrade that is underway is to cool the entire detector down to just 4 Kelvin (-269°C). At such extremely low temperatures, thermal noise drops significantly, making the detector even more sensitive to tiny traces of dark matter. Moreover, the current experiment only focuses on dark photons, but in future experiments, scientists will operate MADMAX under strong magnetic fields so that it could also detect axions at the same time. The study has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
