Like all good acronyms, this one was arrived at by torturously trying vaguely appropriate words until I got to the answer I already knew I wanted: WIMPs.
One of the most popular class of candidates for dark matter has the acronym WIMPs, which stands for “Weakly Interacting Massive Particles”. These are particles that occur in many extensions to the standard model of particle physics, and which interact directly with other particles only (or primarily) through the weak nuclear force.
One of the reasons that WIMPs are so popular as a possible dark matter candidate is something called the “WIMP miracle”. This refers to the fact that a particle with a mass and interaction strength that are associated with the weak nuclear force, naturally results in dark matter with the correct abundance in the Universe to be the cosmological dark matter. This abundance could have turned out to be many trillions of times too big or too small, so it is one hell of a coincidence if it is by accident!
My plan is to make a small regular post each week with an interesting factoid, or “soundbite” style piece of information: think something that can fit into a single tweet (ish). I will call these “WIMPs” (Weekly Informative Mini Posts) in homage to the popular dark matter candidate. Interspersed with these mini posts will be the regular (longer) blog posts.
Enjoy!
Dark Matters 