Question: what kind of advancements in lab equipment have to be done in order to create black matter, and could it be controlled?

Baptiste Ravina answered on 17 Mar 2020:

That’s a good question! At CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, home to the largest proton collider in the world (the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC), we have recently gone into what we call “Long Shutdown 2” (there was a first one). From 2019 to 2021, all the machines are off so we can go and repair them, as well as upgrade various components. This will allows us to collect more data, faster and more precisely, and hopefully help out in our ongoing hunt for Dark Matter!

If we do create Dark Matter, we expect it to be a stable particle, which means it won’t decay into something else, but also to be only very weakly interacting. That last part is more problematic, because it means we can’t control it or “stop” it using electromagnetic fields; we can’t trap it in a bottle, basically (it would simply go through and ignore our container).

However, it also means that if we produce it, it simply escapes our detectors without leaving a trace. Doing so, it carries some energy away. But we know precisely how much energy we’ve put in our collisions, so we can sum up everything that does hit our detector and see if any energy is missing. This is exactly an application of the law of conservation of energy you might already have learned about. So even though Dark Matter is near impossible to catch, it also gives us a nice way to detect it “indirectly”.