The hunt for dark matter lands in Singapore (2025)

[SINGAPORE] From people to planets, and garbage to galaxies, all ordinary matter makes up just 5 per cent of the universe. It would be as though all that you could see of Singapore is its central region – Bishan, Toa Payoh and Novena – and everything else is a mystery.

So what’s in the 95 per cent of the universe that we don’t know about? Scientists believe that under a third of it is made up of “dark matter” – an elusive form of matter that they are still searching for, as it could explain how the cosmos even came to be.

All of this may sound far removed from our everyday lives. But as I recently learned, the hunt for dark matter is happening right here in Singapore. In January, the city-state joined an international network called Gnome, short for the Global Network of Optical Magnetometers to search for Exotic physics.

The network has 15 stations across the world, equipped with cutting-edge sensors to detect signs of dark matter. Singapore’s station, now under construction in one-north, is expected to be up and running by the end of this year.

“We are really at the frontier of physics that we no longer know,” says Professor Lam Ping Koy, chief quantum scientist at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star).

“The thing is, no one really knows about the physics of dark matter. We can only guess... (but) there are certain general properties about dark matter that we know of,” he tells me during my visit to A*Star’s premises.

One possible sign of dark matter is a “pseudo-magnetic field” – an influence exerted by dark matter which is similar to, but not the same as normal magnetic forces, explains Dr Wang Tao, a senior quantum scientist at A*Star who previously ran two other Gnome stations at the University of California, Berkeley.

The way to detect such fields is with an impressive-looking, grand-sounding tool: a quantum magnetometer, which Dr Wang showed me during a lab tour. The instrument can detect even the weakest magnetic fields, but in the Gnome station, it will be fitted with a shield that would block out any “normal” magnetic fields. This would allow only the “pseudo-magnetic” ones to be detected.

Another sleek instrument for detecting dark matter is the atomic clock. “If dark matter interacts with atoms, it could cause tiny shifts in how atoms ‘tick’: something these clocks are sensitive enough to detect,” says Dr Wang.

These instruments were developed locally, leveraging Singapore’s expertise in quantum sensor technology. When operated in parallel, they “help narrow down the range of conditions under which dark matter could exist”, he adds.

Known unknown

The discovery of dark matter traces back to the 1930s, when Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky found that the mass of a cluster of galaxies was so small that the galaxies should have flown apart. But somehow, they remained mysteriously “glued” together by unseen matter. He referred to this substance in German as dunkle Materie or “dark matter”.

Similar observations were made in the 1970s by American astronomer Vera Rubin, who measured the rotation speeds of galaxies and realised that some unseen matter was keeping them from flying apart. As she remarked: “Nature has played a trick on us: we have been studying matter that makes up only a small fraction of the universe.”

There are now various theories on what dark matter is. Dr Wang highlights one of them: that dark matter is made up of particles known as “axions”. If this rings a bell, it’s because the concept was named after the dishwashing liquid brand Axion – in the belief that it “can ‘clean up’ all the physics problems”, Dr Wang notes with a laugh.

Dark matter is a great “known unknown” of our time, and far from being the only one. There is still dark energy, believed to make up 68 per cent – or the bulk – of our universe.

As Prof Lam puts it, there are many things that have yet to be detected, “and so the search continues to see whether we can unveil their existence”.

As a journalist having to cover stressful news – about geopolitics, climate change and the economy – I find the work of scientists like Prof Lam and Dr Wang comforting. No matter what chaos humans stir, we are just a speck in a universe of vast unknowns.

Dark matter is just one of many weird and wonderful phenomena out there in the cosmos. This column free-falls away from the news and into curious black holes in an array of fields, from finance and economics to science and psychology, or even beyond.