New Delhi, India

A new experiment seeking to search cosmos for its mysterious "stuff," dark matter, has revealed its first results.

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Titled the Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection (BREAD), the experiment has been developed by the University of Chicago and the US Department of Energy's Fermilab.

What did BREAD find?

As per research published late last month in the journal Physical Review Letters, while BREAD has not yet detected dark matter particles, it has placed tighter constraints on the characteristics such particles may have. 

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The experiment has also offered a new, relatively inexpensive approach that can be used to hunt dark matter.

Dark matter is a mysterious substance that makes up about 85 per cent of the matter in the universe but does not interact with light, making it effectively invisible. This invisibility has made it challenging for scientists to determine what dark matter is made of. 

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One candidate particle for dark matter is the "axion", a hypothetical particle with an extremely small mass that may interact with a "dark photon."

As the per University of Chicago scientist and BREAD project co-leader David Miller, "If you think about it like a radio, the search for dark matter is like tuning the dial to search for one particular radio station, except there are a million frequencies to check through."

"Our method is like doing a scan of 100,000 radio stations, rather than a few very thoroughly."

BREAD is designed as a coaxial dish antenna that can fit on a tabletop. The experiment intends to catch photons and funnel them to a sensor to search for a subset of possible axions. 

In a proof-of-concept test, BREAD demonstrated high sensitivity in the frequency range it was designed to probe. 

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"This is just the first step in a series of exciting experiments we are planning," said BREAD co-leader and Fermilab researcher Andrew Sonnenschein, as quoted by Space.com.

"We have many ideas for improving the sensitivity of our axion search."

The full-scale BREAD experiment, which is the next step will take place at the magnet facility at Argonne National Laboratory.

(With inputs from agencies)