Jerusalem, 15 September, 2026 (TPS-IL) — A team of Israeli, Italian and Croatian scientists has identified three existing materials that could make future searches for some of the lightest forms of Dark Matter up to 1,000 times more sensitive than current methods allow.
Dark matter is an invisible substance that scientists believe makes up about 85% of all the matter in the universe. It cannot be seen because it does not emit, absorb or reflect light, but its presence is detected indirectly through its gravitational pull on galaxies and other cosmic structures. Despite decades of searching, no experiment has ever directly detected a dark-matter particle.
The new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters, does not claim to have found dark matter. Instead, using computer modeling, the researchers calculated that three specialized materials could make it far easier for future detectors to pick up the extremely faint energy signals that dark matter is expected to leave behind when it interacts with ordinary matter.
The study was conducted by Prof. Yonit Hochberg and Rotem Ovadia of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dr. Dino Novko of the Institute of Physics in Croatia, and Prof. Antonio Politano of the University of L’Aquila in central Italy.
Unusual Materials, Unusual Sensitivity
The three materials are known as “quantum materials” — substances whose electrical behavior is governed by quantum-mechanical effects, giving them unusual properties useful for building highly sensitive detectors. They are: titanium diselenide, strontium ruthenate, and diamond that has been chemically altered (a process called “hole-doping”) to change its electrical properties.
None of the three is new or exotic to produce — all can already be made using existing laboratory techniques.
What is new is the discovery, through computer simulation, that they could be unusually well-suited to catching a particularly elusive category of dark matter: particles far lighter than the ones most existing experiments are built to detect.
Because lighter particles deposit only a tiny amount of energy when they strike a detector, they are much harder to catch — most current equipment simply isn’t sensitive enough to notice them. Physicists often describe particle masses using a unit called an electronvolt, and researchers are especially interested in particles lighter than about one “megaelectronvolt” — roughly one-two-thousandth the mass of a proton, one of the particles that make up an atom’s nucleus. Particles this light are considered especially difficult to detect with existing technology.
Of the three materials, titanium diselenide produced the most striking results in the simulations, potentially improving detector sensitivity by 100 to 1,000 times compared with materials currently used in dark-matter searches, depending on the exact particle mass involved. The researchers say the key lies in how electrons inside these materials move.
Under certain conditions, electrons in a material can vibrate together in a coordinated wave-like pattern — a phenomenon physicists call a “plasmon.” These tiny collective vibrations, the study suggests, could amplify the extremely faint signal a dark-matter particle would produce, making it easier to detect.
A Dark Matter ‘Compass’
The researchers also found something potentially useful for filtering out false signals: two of the materials — titanium diselenide and strontium ruthenate — respond differently depending on the direction from which a dark-matter particle arrives.
Because the Earth rotates, the angle between a lab’s detector and the direction dark matter is expected to come from changes over the course of a day. If a detector actually picked up a real dark-matter signal, that signal should change strength in a predictable daily pattern — acting like a compass that helps scientists tell a genuine detection apart from background noise or false alarms.
The researchers stressed that their findings are theoretical predictions based on computer modeling under ideal conditions, not an actual detection of dark matter. The next step would be building real detectors using these materials to test the predictions experimentally.
“Our results motivate the exploration of these and similar materials as the constituents of next-generation dark-matter (DM) detectors,” the researchers wrote, adding that other, still-unexamined quantum materials may hold similar untapped potential for the search.