Almost a quarter of the universe stands literally in the shadows. According to cosmologists’ theories, 25.8% of it is made up of dark matter, whose presence is signaled essentially only by its gravitational pull. What this substance consists of remains a mystery. Hermann Nicolai, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, and his colleague Krzysztof Meissner from the University of Warsaw have now proposed a new candidate—a superheavy gravitino. The existence of this still hypothetical particle follows from a hypothesis that seeks to explain how the observed spectrum of quarks and leptons in the standard model of particle physics might emerge from a fundamental theory. In addition, the researchers describe a possible method for actually tracking down this particle.
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Source: Phys.org