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2024-11-11

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Scientists Found Dark Electrons: a Secret Quantum State Hidden in Solid Matter (www.popularmechanics.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Researchers have just found evidence of “dark electrons”—electrons you can’t see using spectroscopy—in solid materials.
By analyzing the electrons in palladium diselenide, the team was able to find states that functionally cancel each other out, blocking the electrons in those “dark states” from view.
The scientists believe this behavior is likely to be found across many other substances as well, and could help explain why some superconductors behave in unexpected ways.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (11 children)

Sometimes I wonder how much of our universe is sitting on the surface of a metaphorical lake; and the things we see are just the bits that poke up above the water. That there's an entirely separate world pressing up against ours, and normally they don't interact; except sometimes they do, leading to effects which (to my knowledge) seem to have no cause, such as dark matter, dark energy, quantum unpredictablility and so forth.

[–] rowrowrowyourboat 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

and normally they don’t interact

But dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of our universe. So they would be the "normal".

If anything, the 5% that we do know would be the "abnormal".

And anyway, it's only called dark energy and dark matter, not because it doesn't have a cause, but because it doesn't interact with light (photons don't interact with it).

Although I think you are right that they don't know what causes it. It does interact with gravity, though.

But all this is way beyond my tiny brain.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I don't know if the estimation of dark matter is still 95%. We keep taking chunks out of that number by discovering phenomena are more common than we thought. Black holes, rogue planets, random interstellar asteroids, ambient deep space hydrogen particles, none of these things can be seen from a distance, but we are discovering that there are a lot more of all of these than we originally thought. Together it all adds up, and I'm really not sure what the most up to date numbers look like.

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