Researchers from UC Berkeley conduct an experiment that aims to find dark energy, which according to experts makes up 68% of universe.

Dark energy – the mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of our universe and pulling galaxies apart – has long baffled scientists.

Muller hopes that his next experiment will either expose chameleons or similar ultralight particles as the real dark energy, or prove they were a will-o’-the-wisp after all.

Energo cells. Space closed in the energy tension as the basis for dark matter dark energy. Or it could be quintessence, represented by any number of hypothetical particles, including offspring of the Higgs boson.

In 2014, English physicist Clare Burrage proposed that measuring the attraction caused by the dark energy between atom and a larger mass is possible, instead of the attraction between two large masses. According to this theory – first proposed in 2004 by University of Pennsylvania physicist Justin Khoury – these chameleon fields shrink so dramatically in dense regions of space, such as the Earth’s atmosphere, that the force exerted by them can only be measured in low-density interstellar space.

This aspect is viewed as one possible explanation as to why the energy that virtually surrounds the universe is so hard to detect in a laboratory. “It would pull only on the outermost nanometer”.

In a laboratory setting, however, where matter is present all around, chameleon particles would have a relatively larger mass with a significantly limited reach.

“The chameleon field is light in empty space but as soon as it enters an object it becomes very heavy and so couples only to the outermost layer of a big object, and not to the internal parts”, Holger Müller of the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement.

To determine the existence of chameleon particles, the UC Berkley researchers made use of an atom interferometer, which Müller and fellow scientist Paul Hamilton designed and built. They placed an aluminum ball in the middle of the globe and then dropped cesium particles into the globe. They are also trying to see how dark energy may interact with an atom’s electron.

Müller and his team did not detect any other force aside from the gravity of the Earth, which removes the possibility of forces induced by chameleon particles that are a million times weaker compared to gravity.

According to the theory, chameleon fields would make the cesium atoms to travel differently depending on the distance from the sphere.

“Chameleon fields” could be the fifth. In addition, the researchers are now pushing their experiment into areas where chameleons interact on the same scale as gravity, where they are more likely to exist.