Ep 31: David Curtin on Dark Matter in 'Sunfall' (Part 2)

The Science in The Fiction

This is the second part of our interview with Dr. David Curtin, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Toronto. In response to the kind of dark matter model found in Jim Al-Khalili's science fiction book 'Sunfall', David expounds upon the "significantly weirder' models of dark matter being contemplated today. Since the failure to find any dark matter candidates at the Large Hadron Collider, and the continued exclusion of WIMPs by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, there has been room to develop more complex ideas about atomic dark matter forming from simpler dark particles, and the possibility of a dark electromagnetic force with dark photons to bind dark atoms together. David explains the consequences of not being able to cool down on galactic scales, which gives rise to the spherical halo of dark matter around galaxies - what macro-scale structure tells us about micro-scale structure. He tells us about asymmetric dark anti-matter which may balance the existence of asymmetric regular matter, and could finally explain how something came from nothing in the formation of the universe we see today. We also learn that photons and dark photons are quantum mechanically indistinguishable from each other, which might allow for 'mixing' that turns one into the other, and ultimately gives a mechanism for the detection of dark matter one day. Finally, David describes "mirror stars" as one form of detectable dark matter that we can go looking for right now, either in existing astronomical data or with new telescopic surveys designed to hunt for signatures of the dark universe.

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