Patrick Huber
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Physics
Astronomers and cosmologists have strong evidence that the universe holds about five times as much dark matter as ordinary matter, yet no one knows what dark matter is. One proposed way to find out is to look inside natural minerals.
- Fields
Physics
Earth & Environmental Science
Materials Science
- Topics
dark matter
mineral detection
paleo-detectors
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2029
What they work on
- Test whether nanoscale damage left in natural mineral crystals by billions of years of dark matter interactions can be detected and used to identify dark matter.
- Develop methods that can record nanometer-scale lattice damage scattered across cubic-millimeter to cubic-centimeter volumes of geological samples, and handle the resulting large data volumes.
- Simulate how crystal damage forms and persists over geological time, using models ranging from particle transport to molecular dynamics at the atomic scale.
- Assess how geological changes to samples over long times affect the interpretation of possible dark matter signals in minerals.
More about the research
When a dark matter particle bumps into an atom in a crystal, it may leave a tiny, permanent scar in the crystal's orderly atomic pattern (its lattice). Rocks have been exposed to dark matter for billions of years, so a gram- to kilogram-sized geological sample could in principle record as many interactions as a large conventional detector, or more.
Why it matters
Learning what dark matter is remains one of the largest open problems in physics. If mineral detection proves feasible, ancient rock samples could offer a compact, sensitive alternative to large underground detectors. The project's methods for finding nanoscale damage in large crystal volumes, and for simulating how that damage forms, could also inform how researchers study radiation damage in materials more broadly.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Manoj Kaplinghat
University of California-Irvine, CA·Physics
Build and test models of physics beyond the Standard Model, the current theory of particles and forces, and work out what signals these extensions would produce in particle accelerator (collider) experiments.
Daniel Boyanovsky
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Physics
Calculate how axion dark matter candidates were produced, decayed, and thermalized in the early universe, using non-equilibrium effective field theory, a simplified particle-physics description for changing conditions, to predict dark matter abundance.
Oscar Macias Ramirez
San Francisco State University, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Build a fast, accurate parameter regression framework using modern optimization algorithms to reconstruct the particle air showers that ultra-high-energy neutrinos create in the atmosphere.
The school
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 496 research doctorates a year.
More about Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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