LZ Sets New Record in Search for Dark Matter
New results from the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector put the best-ever limits on particles called WIMPs, a leading candidate for what makes up our universe’s invisible mass.
With 280 days of data, the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) collaboration has made a world-leading search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in areas no experiment has probed before. The new result is nearly five times better than the previous world’s best published result and finds no evidence of WIMPs above a mass of 9 GeV/c2. We have only scratched the surface of what LZ can do. With the detector’s exceptional sensitivity and our advanced analysis techniques, we are primed to discover dark matter if it exists within the experiment’s reach and to explore other rare physics phenomena.
See here for the full press release. Presentation of the new results is happening simultaneously at the TeVPA and LIDINE conferences on Monday August 26th.
Welcome to the LZ dark matter experiment’s webpage!
LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a next generation dark matter experiment, selected by the US Department of Energy (DOE) as one of the three ‘G2’ (for Generation 2) dark matter experiments. Located at the 4850′ level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, SD, the experiment utilizes a two-phase time projection chamber (TPC), containing seven active tonnes of liquid xenon, to search for dark matter particles. Auxiliary veto detectors, including a liquid scintillator outer detector, improve rejection of unwanted background events in the central region of the detector. LZ has been designed to improve on the sensitivity of the prior generation of experiment by a factor of 50 or more. More details on the construction of the LZ detector can be found here, and the projected sensitivity of the experiment is described here.
The LZ collaboration consists of about 250 scientists in 39 institutions in the U.S., U.K., Portugal, Switzerland, South Korea and Australia. The name LZ stems from the merger of two previous dark matter detection experiments: LUX (Large Underground Xenon) and ZEPLIN (ZonEd Proportional scintillation in LIquid Noble gases).
The LZ project received CD-4 approval for completion in August, 2020.
With its first science run LZ has delivered the world-leading sensitivity in the search for dark matter in form of galactic WIMPs from only 6% of its planned exposure. With unprecedented potential for discovery, the LZ experiment is presently accruing science data for a longer exposure that sweeps theoretically very well motivated but completely uncharted electroweak parameter space that could deliver a the world’s first observation of dark matter in the next few years.
Contacts
Spokesperson: Chamkaur Ghag, University College London, c.ghag@ucl.ac.uk
Operations Manager: Simon Fiorucci, Berkeley Lab, sfiorucci@lbl.gov
Follow us on Twitter: @lzdarkmatter