Physicists Utilize Earth as Dark Matter Detector, Identifying Candidate Signals
Physicists have conducted an experiment that effectively turned the entire Earth into a dark matter detector, according to ScienceAlert. This innovative approach involved analyzing data on Earth's magnetic field collected by the British Geological Survey between 2012 and 2022. The research team, led by theoretical physicist Atsushi Taruya, hypothesized that if hypothetical dark matter particles, specifically axions, are passing through the planet, they should resonate between Earth's surface and the ionosphere. This resonance would generate electromagnetic waves at frequencies corresponding to the particles' predicted mass. After accounting for background noise, the team identified 65 axion signal candidates, which narrowed down to 25 after applying stricter statistical filters. A similar method was used to search for dark photons, another dark matter candidate, yielding up to 342 candidate signals, reduced to 31 with a more stringent signal-to-noise ratio. These findings, published in the journal Progress...
