Gravitational Dipoles and Dark Matter

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"Abstract
Assuming that a particle and its antiparticle have the gravitational charge of the opposite sign, the physical vacuum may be considered as a fluid of virtual gravitational dipoles. Following this hypothesis, we present the first indications that dark matter may not exist and that the phenomena for which it was invoked might be explained by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum by the known baryonic matter."

by Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic1
PH Division CERN
CH-1211 Geneva 23

http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.0847

What do you think of his ideas?

Thanks in advance

First, it's an Abstract, not a full-blown scientific paper. This is the science community's way of saying, "I have an idea ... tell me what you think of it".

Second, the word "Assuming" is a dead give-away that there will likely be no experimental evidence involved. We do not yet know if it is even testable.

Third, the term "Dark Matter" is an all-encompassing term that is used to describe matter that can not be detected except by its gravitational influence on observable matter. There seems to be too much of it out there to unequivocally claim that it does not exist.

Fourth, the entire dissertation seems to do little to advance or add to our current knowledge and understanding of the universe and its underlying principles; neither does it provide any new principles that that can be exploited for gain or profit.

Finally, the scientific team behind this abstract may actually be on to something, as real scientists usually don't publish such things without good reason. As long as they're not pulling gravitational dipoles out of magic hats (or other dark recesses), there may eventually be some progress in dark matter research.

We'll know better after the peer-review phase has run its course.

There are no gravitational dipoles.

Gravity sucks.

ruveyn

There are too gravitational dipoles.

Sometimes gravity sucks, and sometimes it blows.

It's not just an abstract. That site is an archive of pre-prints for published papers and yet to be published papers, you can get the full paper(or pre-print) if you click on the link at the right hand side that says "download PDF". The reference says that the paper was published in the journal "Astrophysics and Space Science".

I haven't read it yet but I'm quite skeptical about it. It sounds similar to MOND theories but I think most dark matter is more likely to be some sort of actual matter. Also, there is some empirical evidence against MOND.

How so? Can you provide a reference for that?

TIA.

ruveyn

Interesting. But what experimental information supports his hypothesis?

ruveyn

My impression is that he believes that his ideas may be relevant to the(future) results of the AEgIS experiment @ CERN where he works and the 'Ice Cube' experiment at the South Pole.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2011/196852/

AEgIS project is at this stage~~~ http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2 ... stallation main site~~~ http://aegis.web.cern.ch/aegis/

Ice Cube publications~~~ http://icecube.wisc.edu/pubs I haven't found any discussion regarding his ideas and these publications and my knowledge is insufficient to evaluate these results myself.

Then if it is indeed testable, that notches it upward from "Abstract" to "Hypothesis".

It still remains to be seen if any of it is valid.

It is testable but there's no guarantee that it will be right. I thought meant "abstract" as in the abstract of a paper.

My impression is that he believes that his ideas may be relevant to the(future) results of the AEgIS experiment @ CERN where he works and the 'Ice Cube' experiment at the South Pole.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2011/196852/

AEgIS project is at this stage~~~ http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2 ... stallation main site~~~ http://aegis.web.cern.ch/aegis/

Ice Cube publications~~~ http://icecube.wisc.edu/pubs I haven't found any discussion regarding his ideas and these publications and my knowledge is insufficient to evaluate these results myself.

In short the gravitational dipole is as speculative as is the magnetic monopole. Mathematically possible but not empirically supported.

ruveyn

Quite right.
His ideas will be proven wrong or proven right by up-coming experiments. In either case it is a win-win for Science.
I love the process of Science as it moves through the Method from ideas to results, and so on.

I thought they'd recently found magnetic monopoles. Not as single particles, but they constructed some kind of molecule that was able to act as a monopole or something.

The article proposes an interesting, possibly ground-breaking idea. Even though there's no experimental evidence yet, I'm glad the guy published it; if we get anywhere in the search for dark matter, MOND or no, we will probably end up understanding the universe a whole lot better.

I think you might be referring to this:

While the (currently understood) laws of physics (specifically the law ∇⋅B = 0) forbid the existence of monopoles in B, no such restriction applies to the magnetic H field when defined macroscopically. As a result, while all known particles (including the protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up the periodic table) have zero magnetic charge, the phenomenon of fractionalization can lead to quasiparticles that are monopoles of H. There are indeed a number of examples in condensed-matter physics where collective behavior leads to emergent phenomena that resemble magnetic monopoles in certain respects,[16][34][35] including most prominently the spin ice materials.[36][37] While these should not be confused with hypothetical elementary monopoles existing in the vacuum, they nonetheless have similar properties and can be probed using similar techniques.
One example of the work on magnetic monopole quasiparticles is a paper published in the journal Science in September 2009, in which researchers Jonathan Morris and Alan Tennant from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB) along with Santiago Grigera from Instituto de Física de Líquidos y Sistemas Biológicos (IFLYSIB, CONICET) and other colleagues from Dresden University of Technology, University of St. Andrews and Oxford University described the observation of quasiparticles resembling magnetic monopoles. A single crystal of the spin ice material dysprosium titanate was cooled to a temperature between 0.6 kelvin and 2.0 kelvin. Using observations of neutron scattering, the magnetic moments were shown to align into interwoven tubelike bundles resembling Dirac strings. At the defect formed by the end of each tube, the magnetic field looks like that of a monopole. Using an applied magnetic field to break the symmetry of the system, the researchers were able to control the density and orientation of these strings. A contribution to the heat capacity of the system from an effective gas of these quasiparticles was also described.[15][38]


(excerpt from wikipedia)

ruveyn