New research – How dark matter and ordinary matter can interact with each other

Dark matter is one obscure substance. What we can say is that according to current models of how the universe works, it exists. However, not only do we not see, feel, or interact with it, we are also unsure of what dark matter really is.

Nevertheless, we have some clues, such as how dark matter can interact or “talk” to ordinary matter through gravity. It is not yet known how such interactions occur, but new research suggests that the solution may be something called “non-minimal pairing.”

We asked ourselves: does gravity lie if we lack something crucial about the nature of dark matter? Maybe dark matter and standard baryon matter do not interact with each other as we have always imagined? “We tried to answer these intriguing questions in our study,” wrote three authors of the new study, cosmologists Giovanni Gandolph, Andrea Lap and Stefano Liberat.

According to our best representation, dark matter can be cold, weakly interacting massive particles that experimental physicists have been trying to detect for decades, but in vain.

No matter how well this particular type of matter works in our models, there are still a few problems. The largest of these is called the Cuspy halo problem, in which the approximate density of dark matter in galaxies does not match that of the so-called N-body simulations.

According to these simulations, in order to explain the structure and motion of currents, dark matter in low-matter galaxies must be “Cuspy”, that is, it must be most concentrated in or out of the galaxy. However, observations show that dark matter must be in the middle of most dwarf galaxies.

This study is certainly not the first and probably not the last attempt to solve these problems of dark matter, but a group of researchers offers new tactics. Researchers suggest that if dark matter is non-minimally paired with gravity, the Cuspy problem and another related problem called the radial acceleration relationship will be solved.

“In this publication we offer another point of view to change the frame of standard cold dark matter and describe the rotational curvatures observed in galaxies, while at the same time trying to accurately reproduce the radial acceleration relationship,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers said that bringing such a pair together on a large cosmological scale could maintain the success of cold dark matter and at the same time improve its behavior in galactic systems.

Non-minimal pairing is a bit of a misnomer. Means that dark matter is directly coupled to a space-time curvature called the Einstein tensor. Simply put, there is a new kind of interaction between dark matter and gravity. If non-minimal pairing occurs, dark matter interacts with space-time in a different way than ordinary matter.