The work sits against a funding dispute in Britain. Earlier this year the UK Research and Innovation agency, the government body in charge of research funding, announced it was withdrawing its share of money for a planned upgrade.
Researchers recorded activity at about a billion-trillionth of a metre after smashing particles together at high energy and studying the debris thrown out in the collisions.
Dark matter makes up a large part of the cosmos, yet it has remained invisible except through the gravitational force it exerts on ordinary matter.
Some theories suggest that at these scales particles are more sensitive to dark matter, which could influence how quarks interact and break down.
The result is important because it could help researchers develop a more complete theory of how the Universe works.
Despite the extremely short lifetime of the process, the team managed to detect it interacting with other tiny particles.
Among the early-career researchers on the team that made the zeptoverse discovery is Dr Mary Richardson-Slipper.
Detecting activity in this tiny realm could therefore help scientists in the search for dark matter.
Scientists have detected signals from the smallest distances ever explored in nature, a scale about 100 billion times smaller than an atom.
One researcher said the sub-atomic dance gave a ringside seat to the behaviour of possible new particles.