While many research groups worldwide have been searching for dark matter over the past decades, detecting it has so far proved very challenging, thus very little is known about its possible composition and physical properties. Two promising dark matter candidates (i.e., hypothetical particles that dark matter could be made of) are axions and dark photons.

The MAgnetized Disk and Mirror Axion eXperiment (MADMAX) is a large research effort aimed at detecting axions or dark photons using a sophisticated instrument comprised of a stack of sapphire disks and a reflective mirror. In a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters, the MADMAX collaboration published the results of the first search for dark photons performed using a prototype of their detector.

“The primary goal of MADMAX is to detect dark matter in the form of axions or dark photons,” Jacob Mathias Egge, first author of the paper, told Phys.org. “These two hypothetical particles are popular candidates for what dark matter might consist of. In our recent paper, we describe the results of a search for dark photons using a small-scale prototype.”