Shortly after, Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg—both of whom went on to win the Nobel Prize—realized that this mechanism creates an entirely new particle. Wilczek ultimately dubbed this new particle the axion, after a dish detergent with the same name, for its ability to “clean up” the symmetry problem.

The problem confounded physicists for years. Then, in 1977, physicists Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn found a solution: a mechanism that, if it existed, would cause the strong force to obey this symmetry and right the Standard Model.

This breaking should feed into the interactions mediated by another fundamental force, the strong force. But experiments show that, unlike the weak force, the strong force obeys mirror symmetry perfectly. No one could explain it.

In the early 1970s, physics had a symmetry problem. According to the Standard Model, the guiding framework of particle physics, a symmetry between particles and forces in our universe and a mirror version should be broken.

Several years later, the theoretical axion was found not only to solve the symmetry problem, but also to be a possible candidate for dark matter, the missing matter that scientists think makes up 85% of the universe but the true nature of which is unknown.

Despite its theoretical promise, though, the axion stayed in relative obscurity, due to a combination of its strange nature and being outshone by another new dark matter candidate, called a WIMP, that seemed even more like a sure thing.

But today, four decades after they were first theorized, axions are once again enjoying a moment in the sun, and may even be on the verge of detection, poised to solve two major problems in physics at once.

“I think WIMPs have one last hurrah as these multiton experiments come online,” says MIT physicist Lindley Winslow. “Since they’re not done building those yet, we have to take a deep breath and see if we find something.

“But if you ask me the thing we need to be ramping up, it’s axions. Because the axion has to be there, or we have other problems.”

Around the time the axion was proposed, physicists were developing a theory called Supersymmetry, which called for a partner for every known particle. The newly proposed dark matter candidate called a WIMP—or weakly interacting massive particle—fit beautifully with the theory of Supersymmetry, making physicists all but certain they’d both be discovered.

Even more promising was that both the supersymmetric particles and the theorized WIMPs could be detected at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. “People just knew nature was going to deliver supersymmetric particles at the LHC,” says University of Washington physicist Leslie Rosenberg. “The LHC was a machine built to get a Nobel Prize for detecting Supersymmetry.”

Experiments at the LHC made another Nobel-worthy discovery: the Higgs boson. But evidence of both WIMPS and Supersymmetry has yet to appear.

Axions are even trickier than WIMPs. They’re theorized to be extremely light—a millionth of an electronvolt or so, about a trillion times lighter than the already tiny electron—making them next to impossible to produce or study in a traditional particle physics experiment. They even earned the nickname “invisible axion” for the unlikeliness they’d ever be seen.

But axions don’t need to be made in a detector to be discovered. If axions are dark matter, they were created at the beginning of the universe and exist, free-floating, throughout space. Theorists believe they also should be created inside of stars, and because they’re so light and weakly interacting, they’d be able to escape into space, much like other lightweight particles called neutrinos. That means they exist all around us, as many as 10 trillion per cubic centimeter, waiting to be detected.

In 1983, newly minted physics professor Pierre Sikivie decided to tackle this problem, taking inspiration from a course he had just taught on electromagnetism. Sikivie discovered that axions have another unusual property: In the presence of an electromagnetic field, they should sometimes spontaneously convert to easily detectable photons.

“What I found is that it was impossible or extremely difficult to produce and detect axions,” Sikivie says. “But if you ask a less ambitious goal of detecting the axions that are already there, axions already there either as dark matter or as axions emitted by the sun, that actually became feasible.”

When Rosenberg, then a postdoc working on cosmic rays at the University of Chicago, heard about Sikivie’s breakthrough—what he calls “Pierre’s Great Idea”—he knew he wanted to dedicate his work to the search.

“Pierre’s paper hit me like a rock in the head,” Rosenberg says. “Suddenly, this thing that was the invisible axion, which I thought was so compelling, is detectable.”

Rosenberg began work on what’s now called the Axion Dark Matter Experiment, or ADMX. The concept behind the experiment is relatively simple: Use a large magnet to create an electromagnetic field, and wait for the axions to convert to photons, which can then be detected with quantum sensors.

When work on ADMX began, the technology wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up the extremely light axions. While Rosenberg kept the project moving forward, much of the field has focused on WIMPs, building ever-larger dark matter detectors to find them.

But neither WIMPs nor supersymmetric particles have been discovered, pushing scientists to think creatively about what happens next.

“That’s caused a lot of people to re-evaluate what other dark matter models we have,” says University of Michigan theorist Ben Safdi. “And when people have done that re-evaluation, the axion is the natural candidate that’s still floating around. The downfall of the WIMP has been matched exactly by the rise of axions in terms of popularity.”