Can Dark Matter Be Utilized for New Technologies and Applications?

[sanman]

And of course there's also been the other recent news about possible indications of a discovery of Dark Matter from detectors floating above Antarctica.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/25/healthscience/25dark.php

Could Dark Matter somehow permit new technologies or applications?

What practical things could we do with Dark Matter?

Does Dark Matter interact with itself? If so, then via what force?
Is it possible to have macroscopic bodies of Dark Matter?
Can Dark Matter be densified? ie. could these WIMPy Dark Matter particles be clumped together until they created a body sufficiently dense that it would have significant EM interaction?

If Dark Matter has gravitational pull, then could we use it to manipulate gravity?

 

[BenTheMan]

Could Dark Matter somehow permit new technologies or applications?

Probably not. We have no way to manipulate it, so there's nothing we can really DO with it.

Does Dark Matter interact with itself? If so, then via what force?

The answer is not known, but if it DOES interact with itself, it can neatly explain some of these puzzling results. If it does interact with itself, then it does so via a new force.

Is it possible to have macroscopic bodies of Dark Matter?

Possibly, but not likely. Some people have studied "clumping" of dark matter, and if it DOES interact with itself, then it may form bound states.

Can Dark Matter be densified? ie. could these WIMPy Dark Matter particles be clumped together until they created a body sufficiently dense that it would have significant EM interaction?

Well, either way, no matter how dense the dark matter clump, EM radiation will never interact with it. So no.

If Dark Matter has gravitational pull, then could we use it to manipulate gravity?

Not anymore than we could use normal matter for this purpose.

 

[sanman]

Thanks for your reply. :)

I for one believe that everything can have some kind of practical application, if you look hard enough.

Ordinary matter can't pass through itself, but Dark Matter can pass through regular matter. The question is -- can Dark Matter pass through other Dark Matter?

If Dark Matter can gravitate towards other matter, then is it possible to have both regular matter and Dark Matter co-residing together within the same space?
(ie. if some mass of Dark Matter falls to Earth, then won't it pass through the ground, travel to the center of the Earth, and just stay there, trapped by Earth's gravity?)

If regular matter is made of quarks, then what is Dark Matter made of?
Dark quarks?

 

[sanman]

The recent ab initio mass computation has said QCD makes up 95% of mass effects.

If Dark Matter is supposed to have mass characteristics comparable to matter, then shouldn't it likewise be interacting with the quantum vacuum or the quark sea, or something?

And with regular matter, hadrons bind together through the strong force, but can the same be said for Dark Matter?
Are there Dark counterparts to protons and neutrons?

If there aren't, then where's the symmetry?

 

[BenTheMan]

The recent ab initio mass computation has said QCD makes up 95% of mass effects.

This is why I hate science journalism---the reporting in the article marcus linked to is extremely irresponsible.

If Dark Matter is supposed to have mass characteristics comparable to matter, then shouldn't it likewise be interacting with the quantum vacuum or the quark sea, or something?

No---dark matter does not interact with the vacuum the way that quarks do inside a proton. This is because the dark matter is probably a fundamental particle.

[QUOTE[And with regular matter, hadrons bind together through the strong force, but can the same be said for Dark Matter?
Are there Dark counterparts to protons and neutrons?[/QUOTE]

Probably not, but we don't know. Dark matter is different from normal matter---how different we don't quite know. The dark matter may interact under a new force---if this is the case, then there may be bound states like the proton and neutron. Again, this is not known yet.