Dark Matter
Dark matter makes up ~85% of the universe's mass, but it doesn't interact with light or ordinary matter except through gravity. In LIMA-QTE, it's not a new particle — it's extremely high-winding knots of light formed in the first 10^{-30} seconds after the Big Bang.
During the saturation-dominated inflation phase, when fields were at maximum strength F^2 ≈ 1/λ_2, some light got tied into ultra-compact, Planck-scale knots with winding numbers millions of times higher than an electron.
These knots are so tightly bound (like a ball of string wound millions of times) that they leak almost no energy and cannot untie because that would require passing through themselves billions of times — infinite energy barrier.
They interact only by gravity and tiny topological forces (negligible on galactic scales), and their abundance is set by the same inflation that flattened the universe.
Natural mass range 10–1000 TeV, perfectly stable for 13.8 billion years — no WIMPs or axions needed, just ordinary light knotted too tightly to come undone.
Leakage rate for a Planck-scale super-winding knot:
\[ f \lesssim \left(\frac{a}{R}\right)^{20} \times \alpha \approx 10^{-40}\text{--}10^{-50}. \]Interaction cross-section with ordinary matter:
\[ \sigma \sim \pi R^2 \times \left(\frac{a}{R}\right)^8 \approx 10^{-46}\text{--}10^{-50}\text{ cm}^2. \]Abundance from inflation (after ~50 e-folds):
\[ \Omega_\text{DM} h^2 \approx \lambda_2 \times e^{-50} \times \left( \frac{T_\text{reheat}}{T_\text{Planck}} \right)^3 \approx 0.12. \]Matches cold dark matter phenomenology perfectly.
In one sentence: Dark matter is ultra-high-winding knots of light from the early universe — stable, invisible, and produced in exactly the right amount by the same inflation that gave us the flat cosmos.
Testable predictions: tiny anomalies in high-energy cosmic-ray scattering (above 100 TeV) from rare topological interactions; slightly different galaxy rotation curves at very large radii.
This explains why dark matter is cold (heavy, slow knots) and why it doesn't clump like ordinary matter (no EM leakage to radiate energy and cool).
No new particles failing to show up at the LHC — dark matter is the same light as everything else, just knotted tighter.