On the hunt for dark matter

MIT News reports that dark matter — the invisible substance making up roughly eighty-five percent of all matter in the universe — remains undetected after nearly a century of study. Jessica Fry, a fifth-year physics PhD candidate at MIT, is hunting for dark matter's best theoretical candidate: the axion, a particle so ultralight it behaves more as a wave than a discrete particle. Working on two experiments — ABRACADABRA at MIT and DMRadio at Stanford — Fry searches for faint oscillating electric currents that axions would produce in strong magnetic fields. The experiments function like a radio tuner, scanning across different frequencies for the distinctive signal buried in thermal noise and electrical interference. Fry is convinced dark matter will be discovered within her lifetime. As she puts it: 'We just need to keep tuning.'

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