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Letter: WIMP detection is more like cycling than snooker

Published 8 October 2025

From David Holdsworth, Settle, North Yorkshire, UK

Chamkaur Ghag says that dark matter is probably made of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. The article talks of a dark matter WIMP hitting a xenon nucleus, which sounds like a microscopic game of snooker. However, at the quantum level, it means that a WIMP interacted with a xenon nucleus via exchange of a W or Z boson. It is more like the Madison sling technique in track cycling than snooker. The subatomic particles are just as much waves as particles, and can pass through each other undisturbed, just like the photons that carry our mobile phone traffic without messing with each other(20 September, p 48).

Issue no. 3564 published 11 October 2025

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