Could Dark Photons & Dark Atoms Exist?
Could Dark Photons & Dark Atoms Exist? Tuesday September 15, 2009#spacer{clear:left}#abc #sidebar{margin-top:1.5em}zSB(3,3) A little over a year ago, Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance brought up the idea of Dark Photons, a mysterious analog to dark matter and dark energy that would have created a sort of shadow version of electromagnetism. (The photon is the gauge boson of electromagnetism, meaning that it’s the particle that mediates the electromagnetic force. A dark photon would, by analogy, give rise to some similar interaction. See Particle Physics Fundamentals for a brief introduction to this concept … more to come on this soon, I think.) Anyway, back to dark photons. The goal of the original paper (written by Carroll and others) was to propose a mechanism by which
