King's College London Mathematics School students, in collaboration with Orbyts Fellow Dr Jonathan Gosling from UCL Physics and Astronomy, conducted an investigation to understand the nature of dark matter, a hypothetical form of matter that makes up about 85% of the universe's mass but does not interact with light. Researchers infer its existence only from its gravitational effects on visible matter. The students' experiment aimed to detect an "unknown force" that could be attributed to dark matter by observing its effect on a levitating disk.

To conduct their search, the students used a diamagnetic levitation system featuring a pyrolytic graphite disk suspended over a quadrupole magnet array. This setup creates an equilibrium where the forces of gravity and magnetic repulsion are balanced, allowing for the disk's stable suspension. The levitation isolates the disk from the environment, minimising the impact of external vibrations and allowing the detection of subtle changes in its oscillation patterns.

As part of this project, the students learnt techniques of simulating magnetic fields generated by an array of magnets. These simulations were then utilised to calculate the frequencies of oscillations of a variety of differently shaped disks. The shapes were chosen by the students to optimise the separation of the frequencies of the different modes and increase the frequencies of the modes.

The results from the simulation of different shapes, such as circles, hearts, and ellipses, were also presented in a table, showing their unique oscillation frequencies in various directions. The simulations of the different shapes will influence the next development of the experiment, with these shapes being utilised in a dark matter search. This research marks a crucial step in the ongoing quest to understand dark matter, a form of matter that is critical to explaining the motion of stars and the evolution of the universe!