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Loeb at Harvard is a top cosmologist. For six years or so I've seen him come out with paper after paper that seemed unusually insightful over a broad range of topics. He and Neal Weiner (Princeton IAS) just posted a creative idea about DM,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6374
about how some minor puzzles or "tensions" in cosmology (such as the distributiion of DM in dwarf galaxies, compared to its density distribution in larger galaxies) could be resolved by supposing that dark matter WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) were able to interact according to a special force---which they dub a "dark force".
This is a speculative idea. Probably 95% of ideas that are speculative like this fail. We can't jump to the conclusion that it is right. They don't say it is right---they just propose it as something to check out and consider.
The conjectured DM particle they have christened with the name YIDM (Yukawa-Interacting Dark Matter particle).
MTd2 voiced an idea here about DM and a Yukawa potential. I don't remember exactly when---I think it was in the past couple of years. So that's a nice coincidence. There could be some overlap. Also there have been a number of papers speculating about what kind of (weak-ish) interaction there could be between DMs or between DMs and ordinary. This Loeb Weiner paper is certainly not the first!
But what they do that I found so interesting (when MTd2 kindly pointed the paper out to me) is they USE the idea to resolve some minor little discrepancies---things most of us haven't even heard of---in the standard cosmo model. Mismatches where they do computer simulations of the formation of large and small galaxies---and determine by simulation what the DM clouds should look like---and then compare with the actual observed DM clouds and density maps---and get some discrepancies, which Loeb Weiner describe and address.
So they are coming at it from an observational cosmology viewpoint (not from a particle theory viewpoint) and inferring particle properties like an interaction potential from the observation evidence.
I guess I sound mildly excited. I am mildly excited. Hopefully somebody here will be prepared to comment and shed some light on the paper. Thanks to MTd2 for pointing it out!
http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6374
about how some minor puzzles or "tensions" in cosmology (such as the distributiion of DM in dwarf galaxies, compared to its density distribution in larger galaxies) could be resolved by supposing that dark matter WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) were able to interact according to a special force---which they dub a "dark force".
This is a speculative idea. Probably 95% of ideas that are speculative like this fail. We can't jump to the conclusion that it is right. They don't say it is right---they just propose it as something to check out and consider.
The conjectured DM particle they have christened with the name YIDM (Yukawa-Interacting Dark Matter particle).
MTd2 voiced an idea here about DM and a Yukawa potential. I don't remember exactly when---I think it was in the past couple of years. So that's a nice coincidence. There could be some overlap. Also there have been a number of papers speculating about what kind of (weak-ish) interaction there could be between DMs or between DMs and ordinary. This Loeb Weiner paper is certainly not the first!
But what they do that I found so interesting (when MTd2 kindly pointed the paper out to me) is they USE the idea to resolve some minor little discrepancies---things most of us haven't even heard of---in the standard cosmo model. Mismatches where they do computer simulations of the formation of large and small galaxies---and determine by simulation what the DM clouds should look like---and then compare with the actual observed DM clouds and density maps---and get some discrepancies, which Loeb Weiner describe and address.
So they are coming at it from an observational cosmology viewpoint (not from a particle theory viewpoint) and inferring particle properties like an interaction potential from the observation evidence.
I guess I sound mildly excited. I am mildly excited. Hopefully somebody here will be prepared to comment and shed some light on the paper. Thanks to MTd2 for pointing it out!
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