Dark matter accounts for roughly 85% of the total mass in the Universe, yet its constituents remain unknown. Solving this mystery calls for a wide range of experiments that can detect dark matter constituents with different masses and interactions. Now, Gadi Afek at Yale University and colleagues have proposed a laboratory-based detector that is drastically different from existing experiments [1]. The detector works by measuring the momentum imparted when dark matter particles scatter off optically trapped nanometer-scale spheres. This approach provides an entirely new way to search for light dark matter particles with masses down to fractions of the mass of an electron.
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