Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: What is dark matter?
Position‹2 of 4›: Dark matter is made of non-Baryonic matter
Argument‹2 of 2: Dark matter is made of WIMPs

Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) have been attractive candidates for what may make up dark matter. Scientists place hope on WIMPs as particles that would connect the large cosmic scale of physics to the standard models of physics.

The argument

WIMPs initially originated as an outcome of string theory. Scientists then started looking at them as dark matter candidates. WIMPs are attractive candidates because they show up in two theories in physics and attempt to solve more than one question. Scientists study the hypothetical WIMPs by attempting to sense them in underground detectors as they pass through the earth and by trying to creat them in accelerators. WIMPs are very massive particles that scientists proposed as a component of dark matter. They interact weakly with normal matter. Scientists predict that they go back to the beginning of the universe 13.7 billion years ago, but scientists did not discover enough of them account for dark matter. WIMPs include heavy neutrinos which have been strong candidates for dark matter.

Premises

[P1]WIMPs—weakly interacting massive particles arising from string theory—are attractive dark matter candidates because they appear in multiple physics theories and address more than one open question. [P2] These very massive particles interact only weakly with normal matter and are thought to date to the universe's origin; scientists hunt them in underground detectors and accelerators, and candidates include heavy neutrinos. [C] Because WIMPs are a leading weakly-interacting candidate, dark matter is made of non-baryonic matter.

Counter-arguments

WIMPs interact weakly with normal matter and are very difficult to detect. Most of them pass through earth without getting stuck or without colliding with normal matter like materials on earth. If particles do not collide with normal matter like with a detector they cannot be sensed. WIMPs need highly sensitive equipment and research has not reached the ability to detect them. The large underground xenon detector (LUX) in South Dakota is the major instrument for studying WIMPs and it hasn't detected a WIMP yet since 2014. Scientists cannot be exactly sure of the existence of WIMPs if they cannot detect them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise misattributes the candidate's origin: WIMPs arise from supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model and from the observation that a weakly-interacting particle of roughly that mass would freeze out at about the observed abundance — not from string theory — and appearing in more than one theory is a reason to look for a particle rather than evidence that it exists. [Rejecting P2] No WIMP has ever been detected, and the successive generations of underground experiments have pushed the plausible parameter space down by orders of magnitude without a signal, which is the opposite of support; heavy neutrinos are also not WIMPs in the intended sense, since standard neutrinos are too light and too fast-moving to form structure the way the observations require.