The search for dark matter has blown wide open

The hope is that someday, a bit of dark matter called a weakly interacting massive particle (a WIMP, for short) will collide with a xenon atom, creating a burst of light and electric charge. After running for years, these experiments have recently begun seeing infrequent blips from a particle that glides ethereally through ordinary matter until it crashes into the detectors. Unfortunately, the new signal is not produced by dark matter. Instead, the detectors are picking up on something similarly insubstantial but much more mundane: neutrinos, the featherweight subatomic particles that the sun and other stars produce in massive quantities.

Physicists’ failure to find dark matter where they thought it was has led to a cornucopia of proposals for new ways to search: quantum sensors, liquid-helium-based detectors, searches in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and more.

Physicists have known for decades that this neutrino background was there; they were just hoping to discover WIMP dark matter first. Now the chance is looking slim. Some of today’s WIMP detectors are simply so large and sensitive that they are entering the so-called “neutrino fog,” in which the ordinary particles are likely to drown out any signal from the main target. There is no shielding these detectors from neutrinos, which easily slip through the Earth itself. That means the next experiment to use this long-standing approach for seeking WIMP dark matter may be the last. 

Hitting the neutrino fog does not, however, mean an end to the search for dark matter. Researchers just have to shift the focus of their hunt. “We haven’t seen WIMP dark matter,” says Kathryn Zurek, a theoretical particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Nor, she says, have scientists found new particles in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the powerful proton-smashing facility that straddles the border between France and Switzerland. “And so people naturally broaden their scope,” Zurek says. As they do, there are plenty more candidates waiting in the wings

In other words, the hunt is transforming from a narrow probe into a kind of free-for-all. It’s a big shift. Today, particle physicists are less sure about dark matter’s identity than when they began looking for it. They’ll freely admit that they cannot presume the basics—for example, if the stuff that makes up dark matter is heavier than the Earth or lighter than a radio wave, or if dark matter is one kind of particle or a dozen. 

The uncertainty can be frustrating, even humbling. “The potential range where the candidates could be is so enormous that the odds of any one small experiment finding it are very, very small,” says Hugh Lippincott, a dark matter experimentalist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

But physicists’ failure to find dark matter where they thought it was has also led to a cornucopia of proposals for new ways to search: quantum sensors, liquid-helium-based detectors, searches in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and more. “Now there’s a great deal of excitement. And finally, there’s technology there,” says Gray Rybka, a University of Washington physicist who co-leads an experiment looking for axions, an ultra-lightweight dark matter candidate. 

Still, with so many places to look, where does it make sense for physicists to begin again? 

Astronomical ignorance

For starters: the birth of the universe. Dark matter has been with us since the beginning, and there’s much to learn from those early eons. Maps of the cosmic microwave background—the first light from the universe’s early years—are full of fluctuations caused by the clumpiness of under­lying matter. Reading these cosmic dregs, researchers can tell that only 17% of the matter in the universe is made of ordinary particles like protons and neutrons. The remaining 83% is dark matter, which has little to no interaction with light or ordinary matter other than through gravity.