About three years ago, Wolfgang Mittig and Yassid Ayyad went looking for the universe’s missing mass, better known as dark matter, in the heart of an atom.Their expedition didn’t lead them to dark matter, but they found something that had never been seen before, something that defied explanation. So the team got back to work to make their discovery make sense. Working at the  National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at MSU, they found a new path to their unexpected destination, which they recently detailed in the journal Physical Review Letters.