Danika Zayed

My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is, and why it exists at all.

About

Danika is a theoretical astrophysicist studying quantum mechanics recruited from Moscow State University to work directly for the CCD. She is based out of the Facility, but has her own fully funded lab nearby. As a channeler, she integrates the One Power with her research in order to create experimental conditions otherwise impossible.

Personality

Danika is eccentric to say the least. While generally affable and fun, her whimsy verges on regressive, childlike behaviors. For instance, she likes cartoons and collecting (and playing) with vintage toys. When she doesn’t get her way, she can sulk, whine or throw a fit. Her intellect is quite superior to most others she meets, and she genuinely recognizes the vast differences between herself and others. Therefore, she has a tendency to think nobody else has as important of work to do as she does. However intended, her narcissism isn’t mean-spirited, but she can be abrasive as a result. Despite these quirks, Danika is quite happy and much less troubled than many other people.

Social life

Danika has very little social life, almost to the point that it is dysfunctional. In graduate school, she followed other people to clubs and discos, thinking that the scene was what normal people pursued for friendships. However, she was generally ignored or avoided due to her abrasive personality. She has difficulty recognizing social cues and emotions in herself and others.

Appearance

Danika is a brunette with big brown eyes and a wide, toothy smile. She is of average height with a healthy build and weight. She’s more curvy than slender. Danika has an average sense of style and wears classic, tasteful pieces. She likes pretty things and has an oblique differentiation between casual and professional clothing. When invited to the ball, she had to make use of a personal stylist to select an appropriate gown.

Formal education

From Chicago, she describes herself as a proud product of the Chicago school system. As a child, she attended the Edison Regional Gifted Center and graduated high school from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in 2034. Beginning at 14 years old, Danika did fellowship research every summer of high school at the labs of the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA) located in Hanover, Germany at the Albert Einstein Institute. It was during this summer that she channeled for the first time in the laboratory, and as a result, revealed amazing new data previously unconfirmed. She had a standing invitation to return to the Institute for a doctoral program upon completing her undergraduate studies back in the United States, an invitation she eventually accepted. Her dissertation research focused on an original concept where she postulated a new force of nature and how this fifth force, made up of dark waves, was studied using similar principles to studying gravitational waves, a body of work called the Illustris project.

The Illustris Project

Dark Energy and Dark Gravity: The Yin and Yang of the Universe
The Illustris Project

Dark energy – the True Source
Dark flows – the One Power
Dark particles (bosons) – emissions of the One Power
Bose-Einstein condensates – weaves of the One Power

The group of physicists led by Zayed went looking for something called the “dark photon,” which is a theorized carrier of the electromagnetic force for dark matter — we know dark matter doesn’t emit regular photons, but maybe it emits its own version. The team started looking in certain radioactive decay products by firing protons at thin targets of lithium-7, which created unstable beryllium-8 nuclei that quickly decayed. These decay products should produce electrons-positron pairs, and the Standard Model says that (for some reason) we should see fewer of these pairs as the electron and positron in each pair are emitted at a wider angle than expected.

This team found that there was an unusually large number of pairs with angles around 140º, creating a bump in their graph of pair-frequency versus emission angle. They quickly ruled out the possibility that this was being caused by decay of any known particle, and it clearly wasn’t a dark photon. So that left two possibilities: It was a mistake, or some totally new sort of particle. The team believes the bump corresponds to a previously unknown particle that’s being emitted from the unstable beryllium atoms and quickly decaying into an electron-positron pair with the observed angle of incidence. They found that this new particle should be about 30 times heavier than an electron, or about 17 MeV (megaelectronvolts).

Dark energy is thought to be very homogeneous, not very dense and is not known to interact through any of the fundamental forces other than gravity.

Dark energy can have such a profound effect on the universe, making up 68% of universal density, only because it uniformly fills otherwise empty space. The two leading models are a cosmological constant and quintessence. Both models include the common characteristic that dark energy must have negative pressure.

The simplest explanation for dark energy is that it is simply the “cost of having space”: that is, a volume of space has some intrinsic, fundamental energy. This is the cosmological constant, sometimes called Lambda (hence Lambda-CDM model) after the Greek letter Λ, the symbol used to represent this quantity mathematically (and usually multiplied by gamma Γ. Since energy and mass are related by E = mc2, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that this energy will have a gravitational effect. It is sometimes called a vacuum energy because it is the energy density of empty vacuum. In fact, most theories of particle physics predict vacuum fluctuationsthat would give the vacuum this sort of energy.

A major outstanding problem is that most quantum field theories predict a huge cosmological constant from the energy of the quantum vacuum, more than 100 orders of magnitude too large. This would need to be cancelled almost, but not exactly, by an equally large term of the opposite sign. Mathematically, this opposite constant is represented by the Greek letter iota ι multiplied by Nu, Ν.

The cosmological constant Λ•Γ. has an equal and opposite constant ι•Ν to counter its magnitude so that their net cancels each other out.

In Ages to come, Dr. Zayed’s discoveries will be so fundamentally important to the basic knowledge of channeling in society, that the cosmological constants will be named in her honor.

Zayed ι•Ν (Precedented term for Saidin)

Zayed Λ•Γ (Precedented term for Saidar)
Zayed’s constant

Although dark energy lacks mass, it is not transient, and interacts with dark matter through wave-like streams called dark flows.

Notable Publications

“Gravitational waves are key to understanding dark flows.” Advances in Astroparticles (2042) – senior author, Dr. Zayed.

When the two black holes collided in deep space, scientists celebrated the successful discovery of gravitational waves. This paper postulated that the black hole binary was the signature of dark matter. What followed in the publication were five pages of annotated mathematical equations showing how she considered the mass of the two objects as a point of departure, suggesting that these objects could be part of the mysterious substance known to make up about 85 percent of the mass of the universe.

As a result, she has suggested that dark matter might not be made of extremely high-mass heavy fermions, but low-mass light bosons instead, on the order of one tenth of a billion of one-billionth of one billionth the mass of an electron.

The difference between fermions and bosons is that a fermion cannot occupy the same state at the same time as another fermion. As an analogy, a state is like a seat, and two or more fermions cannot sit in the same seat simultaneously. In contrast, two or more bosons can occupy the same state at the same time, and can therefore clump into so-called Bose-Einstein condensates that act like single blobs. She found that these condensates full of dark matter are composed of waves.

“The search for dark matter reveals a fifth fundamental force.” Physical Review Letters (2044) – senior author, Dr. Zayed.

Her original paper received little attention until a review by extraneous physicists a year later. These scientists looked at the data and came to the conclusion that it didn’t contradict any known theory — meaning that while it is unknown, there’s also no reason to believe this new particle couldn’t exist. She claims that the particle is a boson, that it is not a mass-carrying particle, and that it doesn’t carry any of the four known forces. In principle, this implies that the particle is thus a force carrier for a force beyond the four currently known to exist.

This new force is odd. It interacts only over extremely short distances, a few atomic nuclei at most, and affects only electrons and neutrons. It’s being classified as a “protophobic X boson” where “protophobic” refers to the lack of interaction with protons, and the X literally means “unknown.” Most importantly, its energy level is low enough that it should be able to be created in a wide variety of labs around the world.

What might this mysterious new particle mean? Beyond blowing up the Standard Model, there’s hope that the newly discovered force might act as a bridge between the light and “dark” worlds. There’s no real indication of that, and it’s mostly wishful thinking at the time of publication. But the protophobic nature of the particle could be a key to the different interactions it would need to have with normal matter and dark matter, respectively.

Such a dark force would be useful in revealing the nature of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), the theorized mass-carrying particle that makes up dark matter. And it’s distinct from the dark photon, which would be the hypothetical electromagnetic force carrier for dark matter.

Danika intends to use their results in combination with techniques used to study gravitational waves to investigate the dark photon and dark wave, too, further advancing understanding of the material that makes up the majority of the mass in the universe.

Future work

Her future work will untangle the fabric of space-time in the context of cosmic webs. Eventually, this work will lead to the discovery of the Pattern and the recycling of cosmological Big Bangs as depicted by the Wheel of Time.

Personal life

In high school, Danika went to dances and had a fun time, but was never interested in boys like so many other teenage girls around her. In fact, she never really went on one-on-one dates until she was a graduate student in Munich. After that, she was usually uninterested in more than a few meetings, inevitably turning a dinner into a work-discussion than romantic interludes.

It wasn’t until she attracted the attention of Marcus DuBois in Moscow that she was interested in seeing him outside the laboratory. He invited her to the Ascendancy’s ball as his date, but it was his intellect and conversation that kept her interested. When she spent the night with him after getting drunk on champagne, she was a virgin. She is quite uncertain how to proceed or behave around him after that.