

A controversial claim by the DAMA group that it has detected dark matter in an underground lab in Italy might turn out to be true after all, according to physicists in Europe and the US. The new research reconciles the claimed detection with apparently null results from other experiments, as well as indirect astrophysical evidence. It proposes that dark matter interacts with ordinary matter not via one of the four known fundamental forces but instead through a fifth force mediated by an axion-like particle.



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Ref: Dark Matter with Pseudoscalar-Mediated Interactions Explains the DAMA Signal and the Galactic Center Excess. Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 011301 – Published 6 January 2015. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.011301