A team of researchers from King’s College London, Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and others may have taken a major step toward solving one of the universe’s biggest mysteries. They’ve developed the foundation for a powerful new detector that could identify dark matter—the invisible substance thought to make up 85% of all matter—within just 15 years.
At the center of the breakthrough is a device nicknamed the “cosmic car radio,” designed to detect axions, theoretical particles believed to make up dark matter. These particles are thought to resonate like radio waves, and the device is being engineered to “tune in” to that signal.
The study, published in Nature, outlines how this technology could offer the most accurate detection method yet—opening a completely new frontier in dark matter research.
Tuning Into the Universe’s Hidden Frequencies
The proposed detector, based on a newly engineered axion quasiparticle (AQ), would function much like a cosmic radio receiver. Axions are expected to interact weakly with normal matter but behave like oscillating waves, emitting faint energy at terahertz frequencies. The AQ material is engineered to resonate at these frequencies, and when it matches the axion’s, it is predicted to emit tiny flashes of light—essentially “tuning in” to a dark matter signal.
Dr. David Marsh of King’s College London explained, “We can now build a dark matter detector that is essentially a cosmic car radio, tuning into the frequencies of the wider galaxy until we find the axion. We already have the technology, now it’s just a matter of scale and time.”
Building the Most Sensitive Detector Yet
The team’s AQ is built using manganese bismuth telluride (MnBi₂Te₄), a material with exceptional quantum and magnetic properties. The researchers created the device by carefully layering 2D sheets of the compound, just atoms thick, making it sensitive enough to detect faint cosmic signals.
Lead author Jian-Xiang Qiu of Harvard noted that the material had to be exfoliated in vacuum due to its extreme sensitivity to air. “Because MnBi₂Te₄ is so sensitive to air, we needed to exfoliate it down to a few atomic layers to tune its properties accurately. This means we get to see this kind of interesting physics, and see how it interacts with other quantum entities like the axion.”
The team believes they can scale up production of the AQ material and create a functioning detector in five years, followed by a decade of scanning the terahertz spectrum where axions are thought to reside.
Closing In on the Axion
Excitement around axion research is surging. “This is a really exciting time to be a dark matter researcher,” said Dr. Marsh. “There are as many papers being published now about axions as there were about the Higgs boson a year before it was found.”
The new AQ detector adds a critical tool to the dark matter search. If the technology works as predicted, it could finally allow researchers to locate axions and, by extension, reveal the nature of dark matter—a cosmic mystery that has persisted for decades.
Source: The Daily Galaxy / Digpu NewsTex
