Physicists are devising clever ways to exploit the extreme sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. But they’ve seen no signs of exotica yet.
, a theoretical physicist at Caltech.that dark matter might be made of particles that are so light and numerous that they’re best thought of collectively, as a field of energy that permeates the universe. This “scalar field” has a value at each point in space, and the value oscillates with a characteristic frequency.
Could scalar-field dark matter push the beams out of sync and cause an interference pattern? “The common thinking,” said Grote, was that any distortions would affect both arms equally, canceling out. But then in 2019, Grote. “One morning I woke up and the idea came to me suddenly: The beam splitter is exactly what we need.”
But the search was only ever “a fishing expedition,” said Zurek. The scalar field’s frequency and the strength of its effect on other particles could be almost anything. GEO600 only detects a specific range of frequencies.