Study says supercomputer used to probe dark matter

According to a study published in the scientific journal Physics Review D, a research team use a supercomputer and run cosmological models to probe dark matter. The research was conducted at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and used the Summit supercomputer located at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Scientists explain that Summit was able to perform more than a thousand high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations. This is how the team simulated the different properties of dark matter responsible for influencing the cosmic web, a gigantic web of gas fibers that connect the stars and galaxies of the universe.

Compared with the results of other cosmological simulations of the Lyman-Alpha Forest observed by different space telescopes, the research found that one of the main claims of the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (Lambda-CDM) model may not be correct – the Lyman-Alpha Forest contains various absorption properties generated by light from distant quasars. Represent.

The Lambda-CDM model explains that 85% of the universe is made up of cold dark matter. The results show that dark matter is hot and has faster thermal velocities.

“We know there is a lot of dark matter in the universe, but we have no idea what makes up this dark matter, what kind of particle it is. We know it’s there only from gravitational influence. But if we can limit its properties.” “We can rule out some possible candidates for the dark matter we’ve seen,” said Bruno Villasenor, a former UCSC doctoral student and one of the paper’s authors.

Supercomputer and dark matter

Brant Robertson, Professor in the UCSC Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, says the model provides great information for many observations in astronomy and cosmology, but the theory may have fundamental problems that need to be studied and corrected.

The software used to perform simulations on the supercomputer is called Computational Hydrodynamics in Parallel Architectures (Cholla) and was originally developed to understand how gases in the universe evolve over time and act on fluid dynamics. However, several updates have been made in the last three years, so the researchers believe that Cholla could significantly aid future work in this area.

“You can think of Cholla as a multitool, so the more parts we add to our multitool, the more kinds of problems we can solve. If I made the original tool just like a switchblade, it would be like Bruno adding a screwdriver – there is a whole “There are a number of problems we can solve now that we couldn’t solve with the original code,” said Evan Schneider, a software developer and assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh.