Can quantum vacuum explain dark matter?

Can quantum vacuum explain dark matter?

(PhysOrg.com) -- Earlier this year, PhysOrg reported on a new idea that suggested that gravitational charges in the quantum vacuum could provide an alternative to dark matter. The idea rests on the hypothesis that particles and antiparticles have gravitational charges of opposite sign. As a consequence, virtual particle-antiparticle pairs in the quantum vacuum form gravitational dipoles (having both a positive and negative gravitational charge) that can interact with baryonic matter to produce phenomena usually attributed to dark matter. Although CERN physicist Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic, who proposed the idea, mathematically demonstrated that these gravitational dipoles could explain the observed rotational curves of galaxies without dark matter in his initial study, he noted that much more work needed to be done.

Now with a new analysis, Hajdukovic has taken another step toward demonstrating the credibility of this idea by showing that the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum can explain four cosmological observations, only some of which can be explained by dark matter models or theories of modified gravity. In his paper, which was recently published in Astrophysics and Space Science, he starts off with some background information. Keep on reading...