
The new study conducted by scientists from the University of Granada, in Spain, and Johannes Gutenberg University, in Germany, seems to have come straight from a work of science fiction.
Researchers are searching for a hypothetical particle that could act as a portal to the fifth dimension.
The research could hold the key to explaining the abundance of dark matter, a mysterious and as-yet-unidentified substance that makes up most of the universe’s mass.
Javier Castellano and Matthias Neubert are part of a group of scientists who question whether the four dimensions that humans are capable of understanding (height, width, depth and time) are the only ones existing in the Universe, and speculate about the implications that an extra dimension would have in the Universe and in reality itself.
According to its authors, the study involves ‘New Physics’, as the current scientific model does not serve to explain phenomena such as the existence of dark matter, for example.
In the study, Castellano and Neubert suggest the existence of a particle that would mediate between the known elementary particles of our universe and the mysterious dark matter.
“This particle could play a fundamental role in generating the masses of all particles sensitive to this extra dimension, and at the same time be the only relevant window into a possible ‘invisible’ sector, responsible for the existence of dark matter, which would resolve into a I just hit two of the biggest problems with these theories, a priori disconnected”, said Adrián Carmon, Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics of the University of Granada.
Dimensional Portal
The existence of a portal to the fifth dimension may seem like a fanciful argument, but this hypothetical particle, which would lie between the realms of light (visible) and that of darkness (invisible), could provide a natural explanation for the phenomenal amount of dark matter, which makes up around 90% of our Universe.
“After years of searching for possible confirmations of our theoretical predictions, we are now confident that the mechanism we discovered would make dark matter accessible for future experiments, because the properties of the new interaction between ordinary matter and dark matter, which is mediated by our proposed particle, can be calculated accurately within our theory”, concluded Neubert.