Skip to content
Starts With A Bang

Forget WIMPs, Axions And MACHOs: Could WIMPzillas Solve The Dark Matter Problem?

Sign up for Smart Faster newsletter
The most counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday.

Our dark matter searches have yet to yield a robust detection. Could we be looking in all the wrong places?


There’s perhaps no more fundamental question to ask than, “what is the Universe made of?” What we see, directly, is dominated by normal matter: things made of particles we know well like protons, neutrons, and electrons, and the photons they emit. But our measurements of the largest structures in the Universe indicate that this is only 5% of what’s out there. The rest is dark matter and dark energy. While dark energy might be an inherent property of space itself, we assume, because of its gravitational effects, that dark matter clusters, clumps, and is made of particles.

Large scale projection through the Illustris volume at z=0, centered on the most massive cluster, 15 Mpc/h deep. Shows dark matter density (left) transitioning to gas density (right). The large-scale structure of the Universe cannot be explained without dark matter.(Illustris Collaboration / Illustris Simulation)

But what, exactly, is dark matter? And, moreover, can we be certain it exists? There are a huge suite of detectors and experiments out there searching for it, and yet no robust, verified, direct detection has ever been reported. There is no smoking gun we can point to and say, “this was an event caused by an interaction with dark matter.” The overwhelming majority of detectors out there are looking for WIMP-type dark matter, with a small contingent also looking for axions. (MACHOs, or other sources of “normal” dark matter, have been ruled out.) But all of this may be misguided. Dark matter might not be any of those things we’re looking for. In fact, it’s arguable that the candidate with the best motivations for it have no experiments to their name at all: WIMPzillas!

Limits on the dark matter/nucleon recoil cross-section, including the projected predicted sensitivity of XENON1T. The attempts we’ve made to find dark matter have all relied on a particular set of assumptions as to dark matter’s nature. (Ethan Brown of RPI)

There’s an old story about a drunk looking for his keys under a lamppost outside of a bar. The drunk continues to look in the same place, over and over, despite not finding his keys there and it being quite obvious there are no keys there. A policeman approaches and asks the drunk what he’s doing, and the drunk says, “searching for my keys.” The policeman asks why he continues to search here, when it’s obvious they aren’t here. “Because that’s where the light is!” Clearly, there’s a lesson here: the evidence pointing to the absence of WIMP-type dark matter has no bearing on the evidence for all other types.

The largest-scale observations in the Universe, from the cosmic microwave background to the cosmic web to galaxy clusters to individual galaxies, all require dark matter to explain what we observe. (Chris Blake and Sam Moorfield)

And yet, the full suite of evidence in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology all points to dark matter as being a necessity. In order to get the Universe we see and know today, including to give you:

  • the observed fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background,
  • the small-and-large-scale clustering features of galaxies,
  • the rotation profiles of spiral and elliptical galaxies,
  • the gravitational lensing effects of galaxy clusters, along with many more observations,

you need an extra type of matter in addition to what the Standard Model predicts: some type of dark matter. This dark matter must be about five times as abundant as all the normal (Standard Model) stuff combined, it has to be massive, it has to clump and cluster together, and it has to be moving slowly compared to the speed of light. All sorts of indirect evidence exists for dark matter, but we’ve never directly detected it. In order to find out what its nature actually is, we’ll have to do just that.

The particles and antiparticles of the Standard Model have now all been directly detected, with the last holdout, the Higgs Boson, falling at the LHC earlier this decade. (E. Siegel / Beyond The Galaxy)

We understand the Standard Model of particle physics well enough to know how its particles behave, interact, and what their properties are. We can state with absolute certainty that perhaps no more than 1% (in the form of neutrinos) of the non-normal dark matter can be made out of all the things from the Standard Model. Whatever the overwhelming majority of dark matter is, it must be something not included in — or beyond — the Standard Model. This is a problem, because the Standard Model is so successful; it literally describes all the particle, their interactions, and properties that we’ve ever observed. The Universe needs physics beyond the Standard Model, but the particles we’ve observed give no indication that there is any beyond-the-Standard-Model physics we’ve yet discovered.

Except, that is, in one very important place.

The masses of the quarks and leptons of the standard model. The heaviest standard model particle is the top quark; the lightest non-neutrino is the electron. The neutrinos themselves are at least 4 million times lighter than the electron: a bigger difference than exists between all the other particles.(Hitoshi Murayama of http://hitoshi.berkeley.edu/)

The biggest Standard Model mystery is the masses of neutrinos. All the other particles in the Standard Model either are completely massless (like the photon or gluon), or have a substantial mass that falls somewhere within a relatively large but well-defined range. The lightest particle, the electron, is about 511,000 electron-Volts in mass, while the heaviest, the top quark, is somewhere around 175,000,000,000 eV. This might seem like a big range, but a factor of less than 400,000 to cover all the particles is a pretty good deal.

For a long time, the neutrino was thought to be massless, too. But recent experiments have found that all three types — the electron, the mu and the tau — all have very small but non-zero masses, weighing in somewhere around the milli-electron-Volt range, or at least a factor of ten million times lighter than the electron!

We haven’t yet measured the absolute masses of neutrinos, but we can tell the differences between the masses from solar and atmospheric neutrino measurements. A mass scale of around ~0.01 eV appears to fit the data best. (Hamish Robertson, at the 2008 Carolina Symposium)

For particles that were predicted to be massless, this is a problem! Why would they not only have mass, but why would their masses be so remarkably tiny? One of the leading ideas — first put forth by a number of scientists in the late 1970s — is that neutrino masses could work like a see-saw! You see, the neutrinos that we see are all left-handed, meaning that if you orient yourselves in their direction of motion, they’re all seen to spin in the same fashion. Similarly, all the anti-neutrinos are right handed.

But if you assume that there’s a very large mass scale in nature, like a grand unification scale, then the neutrinos (both left and right-handed) could have had a “normal” mass like the other Standard Model particles, where they were sort-of balanced on a see-saw. But then that heavy mass from the unification scale comes along, sits on one side of the see-saw, and splits them: the left-handed neutrinos become very light, while the right-handed neutrinos become extremely heavy.

The normal-massed particles (in green) would roughly balance the see-saw. But if a GUT-scale mass particle (yellow) lands on one side, that side becomes heavy (like right-handed neutrinos) while the other side becomes very light (like the left-handed neutrinos we have observed). The right-handed ones would make an excellent dark matter candidate. (E. Siegel)

This is the leading explanation for how neutrinos oscillate, and also how they acquire such tiny (but non-zero) masses. But rather than hypothesizing supersymmetry, extra dimensions, axions or some other exotic solution to dark matter, here’s a fun possibility: the ultra-heavy, right-handed neutrinos could actually be the dark matter! Instead of being in the same range as the neutrino masses (like axions) or in the same range as the other Standard Model particles (like in SUSY or extra dimensions), they might be super-heavy: billions or even trillions of times heavier than the other Standard Model particles. In most models of particle physics, the hypothesized unification scale occurs around ~10¹⁵ GeV.

This new class of superheavy dark matter candidate, which could arise via this or any number of other mechanisms, such as purely gravitational interactions, has a fantastic name (coined by Rocky Kolb, Daniel Chung and Tony Riotto): WIMPzillas!

In perhaps the greatest image every to make it into a scientific paper, Figure 7 of Kolb, Chung, and Riotto’s paper from 20 years ago highlights what a WIMPzilla might look like. The illustration is not to scale. (Kolb, Chung and Riotto, 1998)

And yet, 20 years after they were proposed, there are zero experiments looking for WIMPzillas. The drunkards looking for their keys under the streetlamps still haven’t found them: dark matter has proved extremely elusive. The wimpy WIMPs they’ve been searching for, at around the ~GeV or ~TeV scale, have neither been created at the LHC nor have they shown themselves in direct detection experiment. While bigger and better searches will get you a more sensitive exclusion limit on these mass ranges, they won’t help you find any dark matter candidates outside of them.

And yet, it’s arguable that’s the mass range where we have the best motivation for dark matter to live: at these very high scales. The question, then, is what we’re going to do moving forward? Will we continue to build higher-intensity streetlights, hoping to at last illuminate these long-sought-after keys? Or will we try to illuminate the darkened landscape where we don’t even dare to look just yet? There aren’t particularly good, compelling ideas to search for such heavy dark matter, but that might be exactly the problem we need to crack to discover what dark matter actually is.


Ethan Siegel is the author of Beyond the Galaxy and Treknology. You can pre-order his third book, currently in development: the Encyclopaedia Cosmologica.
Sign up for Smart Faster newsletter
The most counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday.

Related

Up Next