The future for d* hexaquark research

Trying to identify candidates for dark matter is an ongoing and exciting field of astrophysics. There are still many possibilities, one of which is the d* hexaquark.

As Prof. Dan Watts discusses in the video above, in the conditions shortly after the Big Bang, many d* hexaquarks could have grouped together as the universe cooled and expanded to form the fifth state of matter – Bose-Einstein condensate. This would be stable over the lifetime of the universe and would behave in the way dark matter is currently observed to.

The next step in investigating this new dark matter candidate will be to obtain a better understanding of how the d* hexaquarks interact – when do they attract and when do they repel each other. University of York researchers are collaborating with scientists in Germany and the US to test their theory of dark matter and search for d* hexaquarks in the cosmos. They are leading on new measurements to create d* hexaquarks inside an atomic nucleus to see if their properties are different to when they are in free space, and are using data from telescopes such as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to look for evidence of d* hexaquark Bose-Einstein condensates out in space.