Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What if dark matter is more complicated?

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Daniel and Kelly talk about a particularly quirky theory of dark matter that Daniel is searching for.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What is the universe made out of? This is the central question that animates my research and my entire career and I've been working on it for decades. humanity's been working on it for centuries or even millennia. Why haven't we figured it out yet?

Well, it turns out, like lots of things, it's complicated. And just when we thought we were getting our minds around, what our kind of matter is made out of, it turns out that our kind of matter is unusual. It's weird. It's not the typical thing in the universe. The problem is so much bigger, so much broader than we even imagined. And understanding what the rest of the universe is made out of

is going to take some real creativity. Not just in thinking about what it might be made out of, but how we actually search for it. Today on the episode, we'll talk about a new quirky idea for what dark matter might be made out of and how it inspired a whole new technology to look for these kinds of quirky particles. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily quirky universe. I study parasites and space and look forward to an episode where I repeatedly mix up quarks and quarks. That's what's coming, friends. It's quarks and quirks,

Kelly. Are you serious? I didn't even get the two words, right? Yes. Nailed it. Oh, man. Introduce yourself, dweeb. All right. I'm Daniel Whiteson. I'm a particle physicist who likes thinking about aliens, and I have actually looked for quirks out in the wild. Oh, yeah, I'm excited that we're talking about your research today. But my question for you, because I read the outline to the end, good job, Kelly.

I think you protest too much a little bit there. I didn't doubt until you said that. Oh, oh, uh, oh, oh. Let's move on. So the question at the top of your outline is, what if dark matter is complicated, which made me think, what do you mean what if? Like when someone talks about a physics topic, I'm like, obviously it's going to be complicated. So my question to you is, what physics topic is not complicated?

Wait, what topic should you be like, oh, this is complicated? I'm surprised. I didn't expect a physics topic to be complicated. This would be like, you know, I would be like, oh, today we're talking about biology. And the answer is going to be, it depends. And like expecting people to be surprised. It's always it depends. Well, a good example of something that turned out to be kind of simple is the Higgs boson.

You know, before we discovered the Higgs, we had lots of different theories. to explain how particles got masses. And then we also had lots of different Higgs theories. Like maybe there's one Higgs, maybe there's four Higgs, maybe there's these weird kinds of Higgs. And so we went out and we looked for it and we found the Higgs. And then we studied it and we've been studying it. And so far, the story is it's the simplest version of the Higgs anybody imagined. We call it the vanilla Higgs because there's nothing complicated about it, which is a little

unfortunate because we would love for it to be more complicated and interesting. Okay, but, but A, didn't you have to build a super complicated machine that cost like billions of dollars to find it? Isn't that complicated? I mean, in that sense, all of life is complicated, Kelly. Putting on a podcast is complicated. Sometimes going to the bathroom is complicated. Oh, my. But when I say, what if dark matter is complicated, I mean, what if it's not the simplest version of the story? You know, what we do in physics all the time is we say, here's a big question mark. We don't really know how to approach. Let's start by just assuming that the answer is the simplest version we can imagine,

the simplest version that works. And we'll go with that. And if the data say otherwise, we'll adapt it, we'll develop it. Or if we just can't find the simplest version of, we'll make it more complicated. But it's sort of like an Occam's Razor approach, you know, start with the simplest possible description and then add flourishes as you need. Yes, right. If you hear the sound of hooves pattering on the ground, assume horses,

not zebras. Got it. Exactly. So we're going to dig into dark matter and all the various forms of it and the ideas of what it might be in a minute. But today's episode is going to focus on a particular kind of weird dark matter that's fairly popular these days theoretically. And that's this little particle called a quirk. And so on today's episode, we are going to get quirky and talk about what quirks are and the quirky ways that we are looking for them. But first I wanted to know if this particular weird little name for a hypothetical particle had crossed over into the Popsye community. So I asked folks out there if they knew what a quirk was.

If you would like to join this audience participation segment, we would love to have you write to us to questions at danielandkelly.org. In the meantime, here's what a bunch of extraordinarily thought a quirk might be. Oh, there are odd little behaviors that people express. I would imagine something similar to a quark, maybe. but, you know, maybe it's something that is kind of interesting or funny about something. That's their quirk. I'm pretty sure a quirk is a mutation that gives the person who has its supernatural abilities. I love this.

So based on the answers that we've received so far, it looks like they're falling into two categories, which are weird human behaviors or very clever inferences where they're like, oh, it sounds like quark. Yes. So maybe it's related to that? And so I give you all a lot of credit for being clever. Yeah, I had nothing to do with naming this particle. And it's not my favorite name. But it's true that it does sound related to a quark.

And it is related to a quark. So good job, Marcus, for naming this particle. Wait, well, you know the guy who named the particle? I do. He's a physics professor at UC Davis and a friend of mine. Oh, well, hi, Marcus. Does Marcus listen to the show? I guess we'll find out, Marcus, let me know if you listen to the show.

All right, so you were getting quirky. I'm going to get quirky. Let's start by defining what a quark is. Yeah. So quark with an A is the thing that we already know exists, and it's the foundation of matter. So remember that, like, we are made out of molecules. Those molecules are made out of atoms, of the elements, you know, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, et cetera. Those elements all have the same structure. Those electrons surrounding a nucleus.

And inside the nucleus, you have protons and neutrons. Those protons and neutrons are then made out of quarks. In particular, two kinds of quark. There's the up cork and the down quark. And if you add two up quarks together and a down or two down quarks together and an up, you get the proton and the neutron. So that's as far as we know so far. The quarks might have structure within them, they might be made out of tiny squigglyons or something. But as far as we know, that's the fundamental layer of matter so far. Okay. And I am getting hung up on pronunciation.

So you say it, cork like the cork for a bottle of wine is how it sounds like you're saying it. Well, I think that would be cork, and I'm saying quark. So it's like K-W-A-R-K, quirk. All right. I'm still not, I'm going to, I'll keep trying. I'll keep trying. Is this an unfamiliar word for you? years into the podcast? You're uncomfortable saying the word quirk? No, it's just now that we've

thrown quirk in there. It's now my, you know, my head gets, I get it too in my head sometimes. Anyway. Plus you got your little East Coast accent going on there to distort everything a little bit. Makes everything a little bit more complicated, but a lot cooler. Meanwhile, I have the totally neutral West Coast accent, you know, the way English is meant to be spoken. Super boring. Okay. So, we think This is a fundamental particle that makes up everything else. Where do we go from there? And there are other kinds of quarks. There's the charm and the strange, the top and the bottom, the six quarks in total.

But the lightest quarks are the stable ones, the ones that hang around and you can use to build matter. So that's a lot of fun. It's a really interesting puzzle. Like, why are there these quarks? Where are they made out of, et cetera. But that's the structure of matter at the lowest scale. And again, we treat it as fundamental because that's the simplest version of the story, but probably it's more complex.

Probably they're made out of something internal that we'll see when we build the super duper collider, et cetera. But for now we can just think of them as fundamental because that story kind of works. Okay. And they're named from a poem, Finnegan's Wake. There's a line in there. It says three quarks from must or mark.

And so this is like a word, I think, invented by James Joyce and Murray Gilman, who named the quarks as a concept, he pulled that line from the poem. What? I didn't know that. Wait, I thought your friend Maurice named the, what was? My friend Marcus, who I will now call Maurice, because he's a space cowboy and a particle physicist. No, he named Quirks, but Quarks, the thing we actually know exists, that we're trying not to confuse people about the difference between these two, even though their names are very similar, which is the frustrating thing.

Quarks were named by Murray Galman, who won the Nobel Prize for coming up with the idea. Got it. Okay, and you really should have gotten a different co-host for today's show because if pronunciation is going to be something that trips us up, we are doomed from the start. Okay. And the crucial feature of quarks is how they stick together, right? Because we don't see quarks out in the wild. We see pairs of quarks or we see triplets of quarks. Like you take three quarks, you make a proton or a different mixture.

You get a neutron. You could also do pairs of quarks to make like a pion or a kion, all sorts. There's a whole zoo of particles that are made out of pairs or triplets of these quarks. And the way they stick together is with the strong force. Same way that like the nucleus of the atom and the electron are bound together using electromagnetism. That's the way they attract and the reason they're held together. The way the Earth and the sun are bound together using gravity.

Quarks are bound together using the strong force, the strong nuclear force, which is the most powerful force we know of. And is that true for all six types of them? All six types of them feel the strong force. And the other particles, electrons, neutrinos, they don't feel a strong force at all. For those people think about quantum field theory, they are not charged in the strong force.

So they're just like neutral. The way that like a neutrino has no electric charge, and so it can fly through an electric field without feeling it, electrons have no strong charge. So they can just fly through a color field, we call it, without feeling it. But the strong force is also much different from the other forces. Like electromagnetism on gravity, when things get further apart,

the bond between them weakens, right? Yep. And you're used to that. And it even follows a cool geometric pattern, one over the distance squared. Just like if you shine a light, the intensity of that light gets weaker with distance. You get further away from a star. It gets weaker and weaker. And it makes sense it's because the same amount of light is now going through the surface of a larger

sphere. And the surface air of a sphere depends on the radius squared. So very cool geometric argument. The strong force ignores all of that. The strong force follows a different rule. It doesn't weaken with distance. After you get past a little distance, the force is constant. So things get further apart, but the force doesn't weaken.

It's really, really weird. Whoa. I'm trying to think about the implications for that. I feel like that would make all of the quarks kind of like pull in on each other, like collapse in. Okay. It means that, for example, it takes an enormous amount of energy to have two quarks really far apart because they're far apart and the force between them is still fairly strong. and the energy in that bond is the force times the distance.

And so as they get further apart, the energy in that bond is huge. So it takes an enormous amount of energy to have two corks and have them be far apart. And so it just doesn't happen. In fact, we've never seen a cork by itself because quarks just like to be together. What happens if you take two quarks and you pull, yes, cozy, right? Yeah. What happens if you take two corks that are all snuggled up next to each other all nicely and you pull them apart, is that it takes a lot of energy, and the universe doesn't like high energy configurations. It likes

lower energy configurations. It relaxes into lower energy configurations, like things cool down and balls rolled down hills. Well, what it does here is it realizes that there's a lot of energy in this bond, and quarks themselves, the particles are very, very low mass. So they're very easy to make out of energy. So the universe prefers to pop new quarks out of that energy, to turn that energy into new corks to shorten the distance. So, for example, if you take a cork and an anti-cork and you pull them apart, then what will happen is a new quark-antacork pair will appear in between them, shortening the distances between the cork pairs.

Where do they come from? They just come from the energy of that bond. It takes a huge amount of energy to pull a quark anti-cork apart, and that energy just gets converted to mass because it's a lower energy configuration. It's actually higher entropy configuration, to be precise. Nothing about physics is uncomplicated, Daniel. No, and you're right. The strong force is like the most complicated thing in physics.

It's so powerful. It makes it really hard to do any calculations. And like anything involving the strong force is a big mess. But it's sort of like if you have a magnet, you have a north and a south, and you cut it in half, then you get like a new north and a new south, where the big magnet is now broken into two, right? Okay. And so what happens in practice when we create quark, anti-examination. that cork pair is that you have a lot of energy between them, and they don't just pop out one new pair of particles. They pop out like 10 or 100, so you get like a whole stream of particles.

So this is what we call jets, and you might see this if you're reading about particle colliders, is that we get these jets of particles produced. So when you create a cork at a particle collider, you don't see a single particle. You don't see a top cork or an up cork or a charm cork. You see a spray of particles produced from the energy of those bonds. That's kind of fun. Yeah, it's pretty cool. That's sort of like festive of you all to name and describe things that way. And so we know the quarks exist and we've seen them.

In fact, we're drowning in them. We make them all the time of the large-edron collider. They like get in the way of other discoveries because they're made so copiously. Jets are everywhere. But we want to understand the universe more deeply. And it turns out that quarks are a way to explain our kind of matter. So protons and neutrons and atoms. But most of the universe is not made out of that kind of matter.

So if you want to actually understand what is the universe made out of what are the rules it follows, what is its fundamental nature, you got to think bigger. But I've got a question first. Do you get jets of particles outside of like the large Hadron Collider? Or do you only get them in particle colliders? You only get them in particle collisions when you break up particles. But that happens outside of the particle collider. like the highest energy collisions on Earth are not made by humans. They're made when cosmic rays smash into the atmosphere.

And those cosmic rays are just really, really high energy particles shot out from, like, the centers of other galaxies at insane energies, much higher than we can muster. And so you get these same kind of jets created in the atmosphere. Awesome. Yeah. Man, describing it that way makes it sound like maybe you don't want to live in space where you could get hit with collective cosmic radiation. But I'm not going to bang on that drum too long. Yeah. You do not want a particle jet in the face.

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And we're back and we're going to talk about our space cowboys discovery of quirks. Thanks, Maurice. He didn't discover quirks. We don't know if quirks. We don't know if quirks exist, they're just an idea, Kelly. Oh, all right. Well, let's talk about the idea of quarks. Yeah. So the idea of quarks is connecting to the much bigger question of dark matter. Like, we have been studying matter for hundreds or thousands of years, but only recently discovered that most of the universe is not this kind of stuff, right? Atomic matter is about 5% of the energy density of the universe. Stuff made out of quarks and electrons and stuff

is unusual in the universe. Most of the universe is not this. You know, if the universe was a cupcake, dark energy would be the cakey part, dark matter would be the frosting, and we would be like the sprinkles on top. Okay. I'm hungry now. And so the biggest chunk of that pie in dark energy, huge mystery. We talked about that on a recent episode. But today we're going to focus on dark matter, because dark matter is something we know is out there. And the question about dark matter is, what is it made out of? We've studied normal matter, atomic matter, we've drilled down into it, we understand what it's made out of, made out of quarks, et cetera. But we don't know anything about what dark matter is made out of, and yet we know that it's out there. And we know it's not a fludge factor.

And we know it's not a pledge factor because we have overwhelming, independent, multi-pronged evidence for dark matter as matter. Remember, it was originally discovered because we were looking at galaxies, how they rotate and wondering like, hey, is there enough grass? in that galaxy to hold it together because it's spinning pretty fast. And then they measured the amount of gravity they could see from everything that glows, all the stars and the gas, and there wasn't nearly enough gravity to hold it together. But galaxies are not tearing themselves apart. So that's suggested there might be some new kind of invisible matter holding them together. And then we also saw some new kind of invisible matter bending how light moves through the universe.

That's gravitational lensing. And we see evidence for a huge amount of invisible matter at the beginning of the universe because they left an imprint on the cosmic microwave background radiation. We see collisions between clusters of galaxies that separate this new kind of invisible matter from the luminous matter. And we can see the invisible matter is there and separated from the luminous matter is its own kind of thing. And we look at the structure of the universe and how that's formed over time. And we can only explain that if there's a huge amount of invisible matter pulling gas together to make stars and galaxies. And that structure only forms if dark matter is matter. If it acts like matter, meaning that as the universe expands, it gets diluted in the same way

that matter does. So we know it's there. We know there's a lot of it. We know it makes gravity. We know it's matter. The question is, what is it? Is it made out of atoms of a different kind? Is it made out of corks of a different kind? Is it made out of squiglions? We don't know. That is the deepest, this question in modern particle physics. Okay, so we're like super confident it exists. Yeah. We can only measure it indirectly. Yeah.

We can't like look at it and pull it apart. That's right. Does it make sense to assume that it should mirror the matter that we know exists in any way? Because I'm going to assume that the similarity of the name suggests that we are assuming that dark matter has similar like things that make it up. Yeah, great question. Well, I think the right approach is. let's come up with the simplest description we can that matches the observation and start there. And if that doesn't work, we'll add bells and whistles.

And so the simplest thing to do is to say, well, look, all of our kind of matter is made of particles and described by quantum field theory. So what if dark matter is also made of particles, just a different kind of particles, and also described by quantum field theory? And that could be wrong. That's just a guess. We have no evidence that dark matter is made of particles. It could be something totally new and different. We know that it gravitates. That's about it, right?

We know that it clumps and it moves. So it's matter. But we don't know if it's actually made of particles. It could be made out of something else, which isn't atomic, like in the sense that it's not made out of pieces, right? It could be that like as you zoom in on dark matter, no new structure resolves. It just always looks the same, you know? It's hard to wrap your head around. It is, right?

And so we start with maybe it's like the kind of thing we know, which again could be wrong, right? But it's just a place to start. And so I think it's important in physics, especially in popular science, to be clear about what we know and what we don't know. So we're assuming just so that we have something to do, something to look for. Somewhere to start. Not just something to do implies that you're happy spinning your wheels. But you're actually, you're trying to make some progress with this starting point. Well, we want to go out and look for something.

And so you need a specific idea of what you're going to look for. You can't just sit on your roof and smoke banana peels. You can do both. And hope dark matter lands in your lap. Oh, all right. I mean, you can. I mean, smoking banana peels and doing science doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. But okay.

So one idea, the simplest idea is what if dark matter is one kind of particle? And what if it has some kind of interaction with our matter, some new kind of force, and we haven't seen it before because it's a very, very weak force. Not weak with a capital W is in the weak force, but weak with a lowercase W as in like it's feeble. And we say that it has that kind of force only because that would make it possible for us to discover it. If dark matter only feels gravity, then we have no chance of ever discovering what particle it's made out of because an individual particle has basically no gravity. You know, gravity already is 10 to the 30 times weaker than everything else.

Particles are super duper tiny. So measuring the gravity of a particle seems impossible. So we say, all right, what's the simplest thing we could actually find? And that's dark matter made out of one kind of particle that has a little bit of a force to it that could bump into our kind of particles and we could maybe see that. So there's a big program of research in that direction, like huge, quiet chambers of xenon underground waiting for dark matter to come and bump into one of the xenon nuclei and we could see it. Really cool experiments. Really amazing. See nothing so far.

Isn't dark matter everywhere? So wouldn't you expect it to be running into xenon like all the time if that was, you've explained this experiment on the show before? Yeah. And I am asking you to do it again. Yeah, you're right. We expect dark matter to be everywhere. We think that we are in the middle of a dark matter ocean. because it's flying through us, it's more like a dark matter wind. The problem is that the interaction between dark matter matter has to be really, really small, or we would have seen it already. If the interaction between dark matter matter was like other kinds of interactions like electromagnetism or the strong force, it'd be happening all the time. It'd be obvious around us. We would have seen it forever ago. But for us to not have seen it, it has to be very, very weak.

So even though dark matter is everywhere, the chances of a dark matter particle going through a xenon atom and actually interacting and bumping it are very, very small. For the most part, it is phased right through. There are a lot like neutrinos from that point of view. How would you tell the difference between a neutrino that bumped into your xenon particle and dark matter that bumped into your xenon particle? Yeah, really hard to do. And that's one of the things that makes that search much more complicated is that neutrinos

are everywhere. And we were hoping for a while that dark matter would have a higher rate of interacting with xenon than neutrinos. And so they would like sit above them. that, but we haven't seen them, which means that if dark matter does exist, it interacts less often than neutrinos. So then it becomes even harder to spot. You have to see more interactions than you expect from just neutrinos and make a statistical argument. So it's getting pretty tough. Good news is we're a clever species and I think we'll figure it out, but we have it

yet. Okay. And one thing to do is to keep doing those experiments and make them bigger and bigger and more sensitive and try to make it more refined. Another thing to do is to go back and say, hmm, what if one of our assumptions was wrong? Maybe dark matter isn't the simplest possible thing, right? Maybe dark matter is more complicated. And I'm sure a bunch of folks out there are saying, well, how do you know dark matter isn't just made out of quarks and it's not like tied up in some particles you haven't seen?

And we have an answer to that. We know that dark matter can't be made of quarks because we know a lot about how many quarks there are in the universe. It's an incredible bit of science. But basically, as the universe was cooling very, very early on, there was a moment when the universe was about the density of the center of the sun. And during that moment, it could do what the center of the sun can do, which is fuse to make heavier stuff. And it did. It made helium and a little bit of lithium. And the amount of helium that it made is very sensitive to the density of quarks at that moment.

And so because we can measure how much helium there is and we can tell how much was made in the early universe, we know how many quarks there were billions of years ago. And there's not nearly enough to explain dark matter. So dark matter can't be made out of quarks. But my friend Marcus, who you call Maurice, had another idea. He said, well, what if dark matter is more like our matter? Instead of imagining that it's just made of one particle, what is there's a whole bunch of particles with complicated interactions, like more like a mirror of the kind of matter we know and love?

And so he said, well, what if there's a version of quarks but dark? So like dark quarks. And so instead of calling them dark quarks, which I think is pretty cool, he called them quarks. Yeah, the Gothen me likes dark quarks. Yeah, right? It makes me like black lipstick or something. That's right. So dark quarks or quirks are quark-like particles that have a dark strong force that binds them together.

And so it's a different interaction. It's a different force, but it has the same sort of mathematical structure, et cetera. So you take the idea of quarks bound together by the strong force, you just copy. be and paste it over to the dark sector and say, we got dark quarks bound together with the dark strong force. Okay, but just to be clear, so you said we know that they're not quarks because we know from the beginning of the universe, we've got that totally figured out. And so what does it, I think I still don't understand what it means to have a dark version of it,

if it's definitely not a quark. It's definitely not a quark. It's just another idea for what dark matter might be made out of. And this particular theory has one more tweak to it. He says, well, what if we take these dark quarks, these quirks, and we make them heavy? We make them fairly massive. We make them like five or ten or twenty times the mass of a proton, much, much heavier than the quarks we know and love. What he discovered is that something interesting happens.

Let's remember what happens when you produce a pair of quarks in the collider. You pull them apart. Remember, there's a huge amount of energy in that bond. But because quarks are very low mass, they're cheap to make out of energy. what happens is you pop a bunch of them out of that bond. You've got to spray these particles. All right, so now back to the dark sector, the dark quarks, the quirks. What if the quirks are really massive?

So when you pull these two particles apart, you don't have the energy to make new ones. There's not enough energy in that bond to make new quirks because quirks cost too much. Well, what's going to happen is that they're going to come back together. So this is really interesting because if you did make a quirk and an anti-tlene, quirk at the large Hajon Collider, what would happen is that they would be produced, they would start moving apart, and then they would come back together, and they would oscillate back and forth and back and forth. So this would look very, very different from the kinds of particles we're used to seeing. And because they're massive, should we be able to measure that? Because they're massive,

they're too expensive to make out of the energy in their bonds. Their bond remains. And so then, yes, their mass means that we can see them oscillating. Instead of, spraying it a bunch of other particles, like we never see quarks by themselves because they're so low mass compared to the energy of their bond that they're surrounded by sprays of other quarks that pull themselves together to make other particles, like we see protons and neutrons and caons. But quirks are very expensive to make, and so when you do make them, you can see them by themselves. We think that it's possible to see individual quirks if we make them at the collider and the predictions are spectacular. You know, they have these simulations of what a

quirk would look like, and it makes this like zigzag almost, this like oscillatory pattern in the detector, which looks like nothing else you would ever see in your collider. Do we see that? So I decided to ask that question, and it turns out to be harder to answer than I expected. Because physics! Let's take a break, and when we get back, we will have the rare treat of hearing about research that Daniel has done. This record is on.

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And artist Marcus, Marcus was not part of this study. Marcus, the space cowboy slash physics professor, wrote the original paper on quirks. And there's been a whole bunch of papers following up on this idea. Because it's theoretically reasonable. Like, all you need is dark matter to have interesting particles with interesting interactions, like the strong force and for them to be kind of massive. That turns out to be like not a lot to ask theoretically. So the theorists are like, oh, yeah, this could be real.

And it makes a kind of spectacular prediction, which would be really fun to see. And so the experimentalists are like, ooh, that sounds like fun. Let's look for it. So it's become sort of popular in the community and a bunch of people have written papers about it. The problem is that though it sounds spectacular and obvious, it actually turns out to be quite hard to find these things. And what makes it so hard? Shouldn't those zigzags be easy to see in the data? I think those zigzags would be easy to see in the data if you knew where you were

to look. Like, if I showed you data from the collider that produced quirks, I think you could look at it and be like, oh my gosh, look at that. That's something. Whoa, let's go to Stockholm. The problem is that we have lots and lots and lots of data. You know, we collide particles every 24 nanoseconds and produce these sprays of particles and analyze it. So there's just zillions and zillions of events. And so 50 years ago, we used to analyze this data with trackers. Trackers were people. They would like look at an image of a collision and say, oh, here I see a particle. Oh, here I see a particle. Oh, there I see a particle. Wow. You can find these pictures of these mostly ladies who sat there analyzing physics data and like finding tracks. And that was cool back in the day when you know, you just had like a big piece of emulsion on a mountaintop and, you know, collected it once a year and sliced it up and found the tracks. But when you're collecting data at 40 megahertz, you know, there's just not enough. tracker ladies in the world to do this. And so we had to move to computerized tracking.

And computers, you know, they're very powerful, but they also just follow your instructions. They do what you ask, which means if you don't tell them to look for quirks, then they're not going to find quirks. And the way that we've written our computer programs to find particle tracks makes it impossible for them to ever see quirks.

Oh, all right. And so you just need to tell your computer programs, go see dark quarks, and then they will. Exactly. Exactly, right. Yeah, it's that simple. No, it's a fascinating puzzle because it's actually quite hard to write a computer program that will find these particle tracks and do it in a reasonable amount of time. Okay. And the reason is that you don't actually see the whole particle. Our detector is like a layer of cameras, and each one takes a picture of particles that are going by. And so you never see like a smooth trajectory for a particle.

What you see is like a blip here and a blip there and a blip there and a blip somewhere else. It's like if you saw Bigfoot running across your backyard, but you don't have video, you have like a strobe light and it takes a picture here and a picture there and a picture there. And then later you put it together into like, okay, here was Bigfoot's trajectory. And so we have that, but we have like 2,000 particles all at the same time. And so the job of the computer program is to go through all those little blips and to say, oh, hey, this set of blips, this was a particle. That set of blips, that was a particle. This set of blips over here. This was a article. And to do that, it has to consider all the possible arrangements, like, what if it's this

set of blips? What if it's that set of blips? And when you have thousands and thousands of blips, the number of possibilities is overwhelming. It's just too much, even for very powerful computers, to consider all the possibilities. So what we do is what we always do in physics, which is we make simplifying assumptions, right? We start with the simplest version. We say, well, what if we knew something about the shapes of those trajectories, about how they move through space, that would make it easier to find them because we wouldn't have to consider all sorts of weird stuff. So years and years ago, when people were first solving this problem, they said, let's only consider one trajectory, which is a helix, which is how particles move through a magnetic field

when they have an electric charge. And that's what these particles are. They're moving into an electric field. And so they said, let's only look for a helix. And so that made the problem solvable. It's still expensive and a huge fraction of our computing budget at CERN is dedicated to just finding particle tracks. Even if you assume it's a helix, it's still hard and it's still expensive. And so that's the way we find particles now. But if there was a quirk in our data, our computers would ignore it. It would say, that's not a helix. I'm not looking for that.

So, trash. And so that's like exciting but frustrating because it means that on one hand, there could be quirks. And it could be in our data and they could be ready to be discovered right now. If you only knew which collision of the zillions and zillions to look at, to put it on your screen, your brain could probably pull it out and be like, buy my ticket to Stockholm. But it's frustrating because, like, there's zillions of zillions of collisions and no human could look through all of them. And so we needed to find a way to find tracks that were not helices, find tracks that were other shapes.

And is there a particular shape you'd be looking for us? So you said they go apart and then they pull back together. Would you be looking for a detector to get triggered and then triggered again as the particle comes back together on the way back? Does that make sense? Yeah. So that's exactly right. We were looking for a very particular striking kind of pattern for it to move in this oscillatory way for the particles to go out and then come back in and then go out and then go out and come back in and oscillate. Or sometimes when they're produced, it produces a pair and they move out together through the detector, but they zigzagged.

sideways. So there's all these really spectacular trajectories that we were looking for. And Marcus came up with this idea for quirks like more than 10 years ago. And there were some folks at Berkeley who had an idea for like how to do a shortcut to maybe find hints that there were quirks. But I wanted to do it a little bit more deeply. I wanted to actually find trajectories of these quirks. And so we used a recent machine learning algorithm to train a computer to find specifically this kind of trajectory. There's a machine learning algorithm that knows how to find particle tracks And you never have to specify exactly what shape you're looking for. Like lots of AI or machine learning, you just train it.

So we gave it a bunch of examples of quirks that we simulated. And we said, hey, here's something you should look for. Hey, learn to look for this thing. We trained it over and over and over again. And then we gave it new data that hadn't seen before that had quirks in it that we just simulated. And it was able to find them. And so this was our first paper. We said, okay, it turns out that thanks to machine learning,

you can find particle paths that are not the simple helix that most particles move in. You can learn to find other kinds of trajectories. And so now we have a tracker that's able to find quirks that we can run on the data from CERN, and if the quirks are in it, it will pull them out. Well, when are you going to start doing that? Why are you talking to me, Daniel? Well, the challenge is that it's expensive to run because CERN has a lot of data. And running an algorithm over that data costs a lot of computing time.

And there's lots of people who think they have great ideas for how to spend that computing time. And they're all right. Everybody's correct. They're a lot of great ideas. So we have to argue that this is worth CERN's computing time to give us access to the data to run over it. And one reasonable objection is like, well, you know, what if it's not quirk? What if there's something else in the data that you didn't expect? What if it's not some helix, but it's something else new?

Why just look for quirks? And, you know, this was my concern also. I was like, you know, I don't actually care about quirks. Quarks are cool. They would explain dark matter. Maybe they're real. But the more fascinating idea is what if there's something in our data that's unexpected? Not quirks, but like schmurks or, you know, blurks or whatever.

Something that doesn't move as a helix. I hope you get to name something. Something that doesn't move in a weird oscillating pattern. Just something that moves weirdly, something new and striking. Because in the same way, if you saw that in our data, you'd be like, whoa, that's something new and weird. Your eyes, your brain could identify it, even if you didn't have a theory yet to motivate it. Because, you know, not all experimental discoveries have to be anticipated, right? It's not like somebody says, I propose particle X,

go look for it. We can actually, as experimentalists, discover new things about the nature, right, without knowing that they exist. And that's my personal scientific fantasies to find something new and unexpected that when you see people are like, what, that makes no sense. Those are the best discoveries. So we thought about how to take our machine learning quirk tracker and generalize it. Make it be able to find anything new, anything weird. And we're able to do it because the way the machine learning algorithm works is you never have to specify the thing you're looking for. You just have to train it. So we took another machine learning code and we trained it to find helices, and we trained it to find quirks, and then we just generated a bunch of weird stuff,

like all sorts of crazy trajectories, and we trained to find those. So we showed it all sorts of insane examples, and then we asked, well, is it able to find unexpected stuff? So we came up with even crazier trajectories, and it was able to find those. So now we have a machine learning-based tracker that's able to find trajectories of particles we haven't even anticipated, for which there is no theory, which if we find it, some theorist is going to have to go, what? How is that possible? I'm going to have to go back to the chalkboard and figure out how to explain that, which would be amazing.

And the other advantage is that now we don't have to just look for quirks. We can look for anything new and weird in the data. So, you know, maybe the data has something new and exciting in it, and maybe our tracker is going to find it. I certainly hope so. So as I thought I understood it, LHC, like, gives out its data to anyone whenever. or any of the scientists that are associated with the LHC. You can just, like, download the data.

What you're saying is that it's not actually how it works. You need to use their computers to run your algorithm to analyze the data because it's just so much data. It's not like they can just, like, send it to you through a tube onto your computer. I mean, the Internet is just a series of tubes, so that is how it works. Right. Yes and no. I can download all the data.

I have most of the LHC data here on my laptop, but it's in a very reduced form. it doesn't have all the little blips. It's like very, very simplified. And so the access I need is to rerun a really basic initial part of the data processing, which needs the data in like kind of its raw form, which is really, really big and way too big to put in my laptop or even to transfer anywhere. Wow. And so the ethos at CERN is bring the job to the data because the data are so big.

And so there's a bunch of computers that do have access to that data. And so you need to argue for time on those computers that have actually. to like their early raw version of the data that has all these blips in it. So we can rerun this particle tracking and maybe see quirks or schmarks or blurks. So when do you think you're going to get an answer on if they're going to let you run it? I need to know the answer now, Daniel. I'm excited. You got me excited about dark quarks. Quarks. There have been some initial conversations about how to do this inside the collaboration.

And people are interested and excited. And we've got a little team that we're putting together. So, yeah, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to run this. And, you know, maybe something new will pop out. Oh, and are you going to tell us first? Like, don't publish it. Don't publish it. Tell DKEU first. All right.

We'll break the news here. If we discover something, you'll be the first to know. I cannot wait until that day comes. So we're trying to understand the nature of matter in the universe, and we figured out what about 5% of it is made out of, though we still have lots of open questions. and we're trying to understand what the dark matter is made out of. Is it made out of some particle? Is it made out of wimps?

Is it made out of something else? Maybe it's made out of something weird like quirks, these new dark quarks that have a dark strong force. Or maybe it's made out of something else, something we can't even anticipate. And one of the big challenges is knowing how to look for something new, especially when you have so much data. But machine learning is really changing how we can analyze our data

and make things that used to be impossible, now possible. Well, you know, I really enjoyed this episode, not just because we got to hear about what Daniel is working on, but because we got to hear about, like, cutting edge, what people are thinking about and how they're trying to solve it right now. And I had a lot of fun today. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on this quirky journey, everybody. Thanks, everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D&K Universe. Come engage with us. You can email us at Questions at Danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www. www. danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord,

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