LUX-ZEPLIN Archives

September 8, 2024September 8, 2024 by Matt Williams

Largest Dark Matter Detector is Narrowing Down Dark Matter Candidate

Technicians scanning for dust on the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter Detector. Credit: LZ Experiment

In 2012, two previous dark matter detection experiments—the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) and ZonEd Proportional scintillation in Liquid Noble gases (ZEPLIN)—came together to form the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment. Since it commenced operations, this collaboration has conducted the most sensitive search ever mounted for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) – one of the leading Dark Matter candidates. This collaboration includes around 250 scientists from 39 institutions in the U.S., U.K., Portugal, Switzerland, South Korea, and Australia.

On Monday, August 26th, the latest results from the LUX-ZEPLIN project were shared at two scientific conferences. These results were celebrated by scientists at the University of Albany‘s Department of Physics, including Associate Professors Cecilia Levy and Matthew Szydagis (two members of the experiment). This latest result is nearly five times more sensitive than the previous result and found no evidence of WIMPs above a mass of 9 GeV/c². These are the best-ever limits on WIMPS and a crucial step toward finding the mysterious invisible mass that makes up 85% of the Universe.

August 30, 2024August 30, 2024 by Mark Thompson

New Limits on Dark Matter

LZ’s central detector, the time projection chamber, in a surface lab clean room before delivery underground. Credit: Matthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Facility

As it’s name suggests, dark matter is dark! That means it’s largely invisible to us and only detectable through its interaction with gravity. One of the leading theories to explain the stuff that makes up the majority of the matter in the Universe are WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. They are just theories though and none have been detected. An exciting new experiment called LUX-ZEPLIN has just completed 280 days of collecting data but still, no WIMPs have been detected above 9 Gev/c2. There are plans though to narrow the search.

July 25, 2022July 25, 2022 by Andy Tomaswick

The World’s Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector has Come Online

Individual contributors have become less and less prominent in scientific fields as the discipline itself has matured. Some individuals still hold the public spotlight for their discoveries, such as Peter Higgs with the Higgs boson, which several other physicists also theorized around the same time he did. However, the actual data that eventually gave Dr. Higgs and François Englert their Nobel prize were collected by the Large Hadron Collider, arguably one of the largest technical projects that took thousands of scientists decades to design, build, and test.