A highly sensitive quantum sensor from Jena has traveled nearly 9,000 kilometers: by truck to Hamburg, by ship across the Atlantic, and finally overland to Vassouras, Brazil.
At the campus of the Observatório Nacional, researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz-IPHT) in Jena, together with Brazilian partners, have installed a new measurement station. It is part of the worldwide GNOME project and is designed to help address one of the great unsolved questions in modern physics: the nature of dark matter.
Dark matter cannot be directly detected with conventional measurement methods. However, it demonstrably influences the motion of galaxies and the structure of the cosmos. Understanding its nature remains one of the central open problems in physics.