Physicists throughout the globe are on a quest for a particle that makes up practically 85 p.c of all matter within the universe, but nobody has ever immediately detected it. Jessica Fry, a fifth-year physics PhD candidate within the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), is one such hunter.
Fry grew up within the San Francisco Bay Space, not removed from the SLAC Nationwide Accelerator Laboratory. She started dancing at age 3 and by elementary faculty was competing nationally. On her workplace desk sits {a photograph} of her on stage from a type of early recitals, wearing a ham costume, arms flung broad open – a reminder, she says, that she would not “half-ass” something.
That features her fascination with the sciences: when her highschool physics instructor handed her a pair of defunct detectors from SLAC and informed her to do one thing with them, she scrounged up a paper from the Nineteen Sixties utilizing related tools, replicated the experiment, and wrote up the challenge.
“I used to be hooked,” she says. “I may reply philosophical questions on how time and house work together with one thing I may bodily contact. That simply blew my thoughts.”
Parallel pursuits
Fry went on to review at Stanford College, the place she double majored in physics and theater and efficiency research, dedicated to each.
Throughout her sophomore yr, a expertise agent she had met by means of the dance competitors circuit known as: A Broadway manufacturing of David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” was casting. However for Fry, it was midterm season. She flew cross-country to New York for the audition and instantly returned house in time for exams. Then, a month of deafening silence. Fry, assuming she’d been rejected, secured a summer time analysis place in Switzerland at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Then she bought the decision: She had been chosen for the Broadway present. After ending her summer time analysis in Geneva, she flew on to New York to start rehearsals.
Fry took two years away from Stanford to carry out, coaching vigorously in ballet, modern, and jazz dance. She additionally realized conventional Māori dance, Peking opera-style motion, and stage fight. She says, “All of these expertise go towards the central theme of: How do I inform a narrative in the very best method?”
However slowly, she seen one thing in herself and the folks round her. Each couple of months there was one other spherical of auditions, one other spherical of exterior judgment from strangers with the facility to manage her future. One “occupational hazard of theater,” Fry explains, “is starting to belief another person’s opinion of you greater than your individual.” She struggled to reconcile her love for dance as an artwork with what dance as a profession was doing to her confidence and sense of self.
“It was turning me into somebody I did not need to be,” she says. “It took lots of reflection to acknowledge that.”
Having hit a crossroads along with her dance profession, she made the aching resolution to return to Stanford to complete her levels. Shortly after, she utilized to graduate applications – MIT amongst them.
“MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science alone is the dimensions of most different establishments’ complete physics departments,” she notes. “Just like how, at CERN, there’s simply this buzz, this scientific power. I felt that after I visited MIT.”
Looking for a sign in the dead of night
Now Fry channels that scientific power into tackling a permanent phenomenon that has lengthy confounded astrophysicists: darkish matter. For practically a century, scientists have noticed that the universe accommodates much more matter than we will see – that the best way galaxies transfer and type can’t be defined by seen matter alone. Darkish matter emits no mild and interacts with subsequent to nothing, but exerts a gravitational pull on nearly the whole lot. Fry is looking for what she believes is the sphere’s greatest theoretical candidate: the axion.
The axion, ought to it exist, is ultralight and plenty of orders of magnitude smaller than an electron. At that scale, it behaves much less like a discrete particle and extra like a coherent wave that permeates the galaxy and clusters gravitationally round matter.
Fry is engaged on two experiments to detect axions. The primary, already working at MIT, known as ABRACADABRA: A Broadband/Resonant Strategy to Cosmic Axion Detection with a Bayesian B-Ring Equipment. “I needed to apply saying that many instances my first yr,” she grins. The second, which she is presently serving to to construct at Stanford, her alma mater, known as DMRadio, quick for Darkish Matter Radio. Each function on the identical precept: Within the presence of a robust magnetic discipline, axions ought to produce a faint, oscillating electrical present.
“Take into consideration two waves within the ocean – once they collide, they create a rip present. We’re searching for that rip present,” she says.
The present is amplified by means of resonance utilizing circuit parts and quantum amplifiers. Totally different axion plenty correspond to totally different frequencies, so the detector is tuned systematically throughout the total vary, very similar to tuning a automotive radio. The issue is that even the amplified sign is buried in noise; thermal fluctuations, environmental interference, and different electrical exercise all cloud it. Due to theorists within the discipline, Fry is aware of the form of what she is searching for, however the axion’s mass and interplay energy stay unknown.
“It is a arduous downside. Nevertheless it’s a tractable one as a result of the form of the axion sign is so distinctive. There’s principally nothing else that appears prefer it,” she says. “It’s a enjoyable hunt.”
Tuning in
Fry works with professor of physics Lindley Winslow, who leads the Neutrino and Darkish Matter Group inside MIT’s LNS. Winslow sees in her advisee a top quality she recognizes from her personal life.
“We share in our historical past a turning level, a alternative between two nice passions and a distinction within the route our lives may have taken,” she says. “These lives-not-lived proceed to form how we method our physics . … I see this in her work: a drive to at all times do it higher, a requirement for suggestions, after which when the curtain rises, the fearlessness to ship.”
The Neutrino and Darkish Matter Group consists of 4 principal investigators whose collaborative construction Fry describes as probably the greatest options of the division, one which has pushed her nicely past her personal subfield. Exterior the lab, in a studio in an outdated church close to Harvard, she nonetheless dances. “On the finish of an extended day of utilizing my mind,” she says, “I really like simply being in my physique.”
Nonetheless within the remaining stretch of her program, Fry has already earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Science 2026 list . For now, she is concentrated on finishing the information evaluation for DMRadio and seeing the detector to the end line. What comes subsequent – postdoctoral positions, her personal lab group, probably her personal detector – she considers with a readability she attributes, partly, to having already made a more durable resolution as soon as earlier than.
“I spotted that doing physics goes to make me pleased and permit me to make the impression I need to,” she says. “I preserve checking in on that. I do not need to simply chase status and go to the tip of the street as a result of I can. I need to be sure it is what I need to do.”
She is satisfied darkish matter shall be found inside her lifetime. She says “when,” not “if.” The detection method she has spent 5 years refining is, she thinks, among the many most promising ones within the discipline. “We simply have to preserve tuning.”
