Dark matter is one of the biggest, most enduring mysteries of contemporary physics. To put the nature of the problem all too briefly, decades of observation and modelling have consistently pointed to a peculiar result – there’s a form of matter that seems to account for 85 per cent of all matter in the Universe and that scientists still can’t identify. This video from Quanta Magazine takes viewers inside one hunt for this massive missing piece of the universal puzzle, led by the Russian-born Australian experimental physicist Alex Sushkov out of his lab at Boston University. There, he and his team are searching for the hypothetical particle known as the axion in hopes that it could help solve the dark-matter mystery. Featuring in-the-lab footage and nifty animated explainers, the short is both a worthwhile primer on the nature of dark matter and a fascinating dispatch from one of the search’s most intriguing frontiers.
