Search for Dark Matter Reveals Surprising Result
For the better part of a century, people have been trying to understand dark matter.
This invisible substance makes up roughly 85% of the mass in the universe but has never been directly detected. Determining exactly what it is remains one of the biggest questions about our world.
Now, a new analysis from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) found one particle interaction that could be interpreted as a signal from WIMPs, a dark matter candidate. The result does not yet meet the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery but is the most compelling hint of dark matter reported by the experiment to date.
LZ is an international collaboration of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions including the University of Rochester, which played a critical role in collecting the data for this result.
“The digital electronics that was used to digitize the detector pulses was designed and built in Rochester, “says by Frank Wolfs, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, who leads the Rochester group.
“In addition, important parameters used by the analysis (trigger and detection efficiencies) were determined by the Rochester group. As LZ continues to collect data, the analysis of more data will provide us with more information about events similar to this intriguing result.
The detector is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and operates nearly one mile below ground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota. The experiment uses 10 tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon to search for dark matter and is optimized to look for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles.