THE HERA particle accelerator in Germany is set to call it quits in June, but a lone physicist is now campaigning for HERA to have one last hurrah. He claims it could discover a particle believed by many to account for the unseen dark matter that constitutes the bulk of the universe’s mass.
The particle in question is the axion. Proposed in 1977 to solve a problem with the strong nuclear force, these hypothetical entities have been considered as strong candidates for dark matter, because they have very little mass and barely interact with matter.
One of the most tantalising…
