An international team of scientists may be close to tracking down the mysterious dark matter which makes up more than a quarter of the universe but has never been seen.

Experts at the CERN research centre in Switzerland say a final identification of what makes up the enigmatic material would solve one of the biggest mysteries in physics and open up new research into the possibility of multiple universes and other areas.

Samuel Ting, who headed the research team, says they picked up what might be the first physical trace left by dark matter while studying cosmic rays recorded on the International Space Station.

He has told a packed seminar at CERN, near Geneva, that the team found a surge of positron particles that might have come from dark matter.

He says in the coming months, the CERN-built AMS particle detector on the space station "will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter or if they have some other origin".

Professor Ting, a Nobel physics prize winner from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says dark matter "is one of the most important mysteries of physics today".

'Whole new world'

Sometimes called the sculptor of the universe's millions of galaxies because of the way its gravity shapes their formation, dark matter's existence has long been recognised because of the way it pushes visible stars and planets around.

But efforts in laboratories on earth and in deep underground caverns to find concrete evidence that it is there, and to establish what it is, have so far proven fruitless.

Professor Ting says it is also possible the surges came from pulsars - rotating neutron stars that emit a pulsing radiation.

But CERN physicist Pauline Gagnon says the precision of the AMS could make it possible "to get a first hold on dark matter really soon".

"That would be terrific, like discovering a completely new continent," she said.

"It would really open the door to a whole new world."

Dr Gagnon was on one of the two CERN teams that believe they found evidence of the elusive Higgs particle in the centre's Large Hadron Collider last year.

'Dark energy'

Physics professor John Conway, who works at CERN, says a confirmed dark matter discovery would push scientists into uncharted realms of research.

He says fresh insights could be gained into super-symmetry, a theory that says the current known 17 elementary particles have heavier but invisible counterparts, and dimensions beyond the currently known length, breadth and height, and time.

Other scientists, especially cosmologists now trying to peer back beyond the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, suggest the identification of dark matter could give new clues to whether the universe itself is alone or one of many.

New research could start at CERN's Large Hadron Collider when the vast machine resumes operations in early 2015.

The huge subterranean complex running under the Franco-Swiss border at the foot of the Jura mountains was shut down in February to double its power and multiply the millions of "mini-Big Bang" particle collisions it can stage daily.

Until last week, dark matter was thought to make up around 24 per cent of the universe, with normal matter - galaxies, stars and planets - accounting for about 4.5 per cent.

But then the European Space Agency's Planck satellite team reported that mapping of echoes of the early cosmos showed dark matter made up 26.8 per cent and ordinary matter 4.9 per cent - together the total of the material of the universe.

The dominant constituent is the non-material "dark energy", as mysterious as dark matter and believed to be the driver of cosmic expansion.

Reuters