Popular MechanicsScientists Have a New Tool to Detect Hidden Dark Matter: Plain Ol’ SugarElizabeth Rayne
Mon, October 27, 2025 at 10:00 AM EDT
4 min read
Scientists Could Use Sugar to Detect Dark Matter HUIZENG HU - Getty ImagesHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
*For decades, scientists have searched for heavy dark matter particles, but no method has ever been able to detect them.
*The SWEET project was developed by a team of researchers to detect sugar crystals for detecting hypothetical light dark matter particles.
*Because sugar is made of three elements with nuclei of different sizes, this increases the range of dark matter particles they could interact with and therefore detect.
While dark matter continues to elude us—even massive detectors have failed to pick up any signals—there must be some element or substance that will finally be able to prove the existence of what is otherwise invisible. Is it found deep in the Earth? Or in the bowels of a lab where it must be painstakingly synthesized?
Why not a can of soda?
Decades of experiments have hit a dead end searching for weakly interacting, massive particles (WIMPs), thought to be heavy dark matter particles that emerged at the dawn of the universe.
Researchers have spent billions of dollars building and operating underground detectors for them, where interfering radiation could not reach, in anticipation of a WIMP head-butting a nucleus of xenon or germanium—but the funds might as well have vanished into space. There were no signs of these hypothetical heavy dark matter particles anywhere. So much emphasis was placed on WIMPs that other potential mass ranges for the matter we cannot see remained unexplored.
But hypotheses are now shifting. Scientists believe there is a possibility that dark matter exists as lighter WIMP-type particles—lighter than a proton—whose interactions are so easily drowned out by noise that they are extremely difficult to detect. Finding these particles requires the right molecule.
Now, a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Physics says that secret may lie within the form of sugar. Unlike the pure hydrogen often used to probe for dark matter, sucrose contains 22 hydrogen atoms per molecule. This density increases its chance of bumping into dark matter particles—more so than materials that are far more expensive or exotic.
“Several collaborations … are developing next-generation detectors with the goal of accessing lower dark matter masses with unprecedented sensitivity,” the researchers said in a study
posted to the preprint server arXiv, which is currently awaiting peer review.
The SWEET project, as it is now called, uses sugar crystals as dark matter particle detectors. Sucrose is actually a disaccharide isomer. As a disaccharide, it is a merger of two monosaccharides (sugar molecules that cannot be reduced any further) and being an isomer means it has the same molecular formula as other compounds, but the atoms in its molecules are differently arranged.
The SWEET researchers are especially interested in the different sizes of nuclei in the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms that make up sucrose, and how they could possibly bump into and therefore detect dark matter particles with more diverse masses.
Sugar crystals were grown from a highly saturated solution of sucrose and deionized water. After the water evaporated, the most perfect of these individual crystals were cooled to absolute zero and outfitted with hypersensitive sensors. A light detector on the sensor revealed that the sugar was giving off scintillation light at high energies, which helps with filtering out background noise and identifying signals when particles interact.
After 19 hours of collecting data, the team saw that its cryogenic sugar detector was capable of identifying thermal pulses from particle interactions—even though there were no dark matter particles involved.
“Particle interactions within the crystal were successfully detected and showed normal pulse shapes, indicating that the material responds in a consistent and measurable manner,” the scientists said. “This behavior suggests that sugar remains a promising candidate material worthy of further investigation.”
In the future, the team plans to upgrade by improving the circuit for the sensor, adding an X-ray source to give an assist with measuring signals, and using a new data collection system that more effectively filters out noise. The scientists will also grow larger sugar crystals using purer sugar and are already updating the crystal growth facility. Now that’s sweet.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/scientists-tool-detect-hidden-dark-140000597.html
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