Heat Interactions with Non-Normal Matter

danielu13

So I saw another post asking about heat interactions in a vacuum, and it got me to wondering: is there any significant interaction of heat with non-normal matter, such as dark matter, anti-matter, and strange matter. I would assume the heat interaction with anti-matter would be pretty much the same as normal matter, but I'm not sure and have no idea at all about other types of matter.

Drakkith

Antimatter is the same as normal matter in regards to heat. Dark matter has not been observed to interact in any way that could cause heat. It doesn't seem to interact through any force other than gravity, which would not allow it to transfer energy around to other particles, so heat isn't even a concept you could apply to it. Strange matter hasn't been observed to exist at all, unless you count dark matter as strange matter, so we can't say anything about that.

twofish-quant

Yes. One thing that you learn in thermodynamics is a "cookbook" method for figuring out how weird new manager behaves with heat. Describing that "cookbook" method is something you'll find in Thermal Physics by Kittel and Kroemer.

The important quantity is to figure out how much energy transfer happens. Once you have significant amounts of energy transfer then things will go to a particular distribution.

Dark matter is interesting because when the universe was young then dark matter was reacting very heavily with the surround matter. As the universe expands, dark matter stops interacting, so it will have the temperature of the moment at which dark matter stopped reacting.

ImaLooser

Couldn't it interact through the weak force, or some equally weak unknown force? It would be hard to tell.

Drakkith

We should avoid talking about things that COULD happen unless we have good reason to believe it SHOULD happen. Dark matter may interact with normal matter, but if it does then it does so only very weakly. I don't know if we think it may interact through the weak interaction or not.