The subsequent era of darkish matter detectors has arrived.
A large new effort to detect the elusive substance has reported its first outcomes. Following a time-honored custom of darkish matter hunters, the experiment, referred to as LZ, didn’t discover darkish matter. But it has performed that higher than ever earlier than, physicists report July 7 in a digital webinar and a paper posted on LZ’s web site. And with a number of extra years of data-taking deliberate from LZ and different experiments prefer it, physicists are hopeful they’ll lastly get a glimpse of darkish matter.
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“Dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in particle physics today,” LZ spokesperson Hugh Lippincott, a physicist on the University of California, Santa Barbara stated through the webinar.
LZ, or LUX-ZEPLIN, goals to find the unidentified particles which might be thought to make up many of the universe’s matter. Although nobody has ever conclusively detected a particle of darkish matter, its affect on the universe might be seen within the motions of stars and galaxies, and through different cosmic observations (SN: 7/24/18).
Located about 1.5 kilometers underground on the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, S.D., the detector is full of 10 metric tons of liquid xenon. If darkish matter particles crash into the nuclei of any of these xenon atoms, they might produce flashes of sunshine that the detector would decide up.
The LZ experiment is one in all a brand new era of larger, badder darkish matter detectors primarily based on liquid xenon, which additionally consists of XENONnT in Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy and PandaX-4T within the China Jinping Underground Laboratory. The experiments goal to detect a theorized sort of darkish matter referred to as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs (SN: 12/13/16). Scientists scaled up the search to permit for a greater likelihood of spying the particles, with every detector containing a number of tons of liquid xenon.
Using solely about 60 days’ value of information, LZ has already surpassed earlier efforts to pin down WIMPs (SN: 5/28/18). “It’s really impressive what they’ve been able to pull off; it’s a technological marvel,” says theoretical physicist Dan Hooper of Fermilab in Batavia, Ill, who was not concerned with the examine.
Although LZ’s search got here up empty, “the way something’s going to be discovered is when you have multiple years in a row of running,” says LZ collaborator Matthew Szydagis, a physicist on the University at Albany in New York. LZ is anticipated to run for about 5 years, and information from that prolonged interval might present physicists’ finest likelihood to seek out the particles.
Now that the detector has confirmed its potential, says LZ physicist Kevin Lesko of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, “we’re excited about what we’re going to see.”