Giovanni Cantatore is feeling rather troubled. On the face of it, he shouldn't be: his experimental results suggest that he and his colleagues have succeeded in creating dark matter, and, although this is the stuff that is thought to make up about 85% of all the matter in the universe, no one has ever managed to see so much as a particle of it before. Detecting it would be a major breakthrough; working out how to make it in the laboratory should put him and his colleagues in the running for a Nobel prize.
And yet Cantatore, who works at the Italian institute for nuclear physics in Trieste, is troubled. Why? Because there's something about his team's results that makes no sense.
Their dark matter particles - called axions - aren't behaving as they should. They seem to be endowed with a property that means they should have sucked the ...
