Search for a tiny fourth dimension

Physicists and computer engineers seek to expand our thinking about space and time.

Scientists believe that the fourth dimension is ‘out there,’ and the theory goes that it would be a billionth of a nanometre in size. Now, a team of physicists at Virginia Tech believe they could find it using a very large Eight-meter-wavelength Transient Array radio telescope.
 
The group from the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech are looking for a small primordial black hole that, when it explodes, could produce a radio pulse that can be detected back on Earth. These black holes are called primordial because they were created a fraction of a second after the beginning of the Universe.
 
Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation in the US, the team are preparing to set up the Eight-meter-wavelength Transient Array radio telescope in Montgomery County, Maryland, to search the sky for these radio pulses from explosions up to 300 light years away. The team also have a similar telescope set up in South-western North Carolina.
 
“We have a number of things in mind that have been predicted to produce radio pulses, which have not been seen,” said John Simonetti, associate professor of physics in the College of Science. “One of them is a primordial black hole explosion.”
 
“Basically we’re looking for any exotic, high-energy explosion that would produce radio waves,” Simonetti said. “If a pulse is detected in both instruments at about the same time, that’s a good indication we’re talking about something real as opposed to a pulse from manmade interference,” Simonetti said.
 
String theory is an important paradigm behind this project. String theory is an area in physics that believes that the building blocks of the Universe are small strings of matter that oscillates much like a guitar string.
 
“String theory requires extra dimensions to be a consistent theory,” said Michael Kavic, a graduate student and one of the investigators on the project. “String theory suggests a minimum of 10 dimensions, but we’re only considering models with one extra dimension.”
 
The researchers plan to run the search for at least five years.
 
“If we had evidence there is an extra dimension, it would really revolutionise how we think about space and time,” added Kavic. “This would be a very exciting discovery.”
 
For more information, visit the project online.

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