Because there's nothing really to interfere with them, there's nothing to dampen this motion, which we can imagine as being leftover from the early, energetic days of the universe. Dimopoulos' paper finds that "if the magnetic field is strong enough, axionic dark matter is modified to lead to the violation of the weak and dominant energy conditions." In other words, axionic matter may be transformed into a state of negative energy.Īnd matter with negative mass-energy, otherwise known as exotic matter, is prescriptive of a wormhole, a "throat" connecting two mouths located at different, potentially very far apart locations in the universe.Īn important thing about axions (should axions exist) is that they naturally oscillate. Put some axions in the presence of an extreme magnetic field and strange stuff should start to happen. This something more has to do with axions' weak but still present relationship to the electromagnetic force. "However, the effect of this interaction to the axionic condensate itself has been largely ignored, assuming that it is negligible." Maybe there's more to it, Dimopoulos surmises. "Many authors have considered the electromagnetic interaction of axion particles," writes Konstantinos Dimopoulos of Lancaster University in the UK. The wormhole idea has to do with how axions interact with electromagnetic fields.
Axions are currently being hunted for via experiments involving giant Earth-based mirrors. Crucially, while individual axions would be very light, they would together make up enough mass to account for the dark matter halos that form the gravitational scaffolding of galaxies.