New Theory of Secondary Inflation Expands Options for Avoiding an Excess of Dark Matter

Samuel McDermott, a postdoc at Stony Brook’s C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, is co-author of a groundbreaking paper on dark matter to be published January 18 by physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Stony Brook University.

The paper, authored by Hooman Davoudias and published in Physical Review Letters, suggests a shorter secondary inflationary period that could account for the amount of dark matter estimated to exist throughout the cosmos.

Standard cosmology—that is, the Big Bang Theory with its early period of exponential growth known as inflation—is the prevailing scientific model for our universe, in which the entirety of space and time ballooned out from a very hot, very dense point into a homogeneous and ever-expanding vastness.

Some theories that elegantly explain perplexing oddities in physics—for example, the inordinate weakness of gravity compared to other fundamental interactions such as the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces—cannot be fully accepted because they predict more dark matter than empirical observations can support. The new theory appears to solves that problem.

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New Theory of Secondary Inflation Expands Options for Avoiding an Excess of Dark Matter