The LUX-ZEPLIN detector, known as the most sensitive dark matter detector worldwide, is part of a collaborative effort involving scientists from 38 institutions, including UAlbany's Associate Professors Cecilia Levy and Matthew Szydagis. The project, led by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, operates nearly one mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota.
The LZ experiment aims to detect dark matter by observing light and other signals that arise when dark matter particles collide with other matter - particularly 10 tons of liquid xenon. While direct detection has not yet been achieved, the latest findings help scientists refine their search.
A Significant Mystery in Physics
"Dark matter interacts very, very rarely with normal matter, but we don't know exactly how rarely," Levy explained. "The way we measure it is through this cross section, or how probable an interaction is within our detector. Depending on the mass of a dark matter particle, which we don't know yet, an interaction within the detector is more or less probable. What the new LZ results tell us is that dark matter interacts with normal matter even more rarely than we thought, and the only instrument in the world that is sensitive enough to measure that is LZ."
The new LZ findings are important in narrowing the possibilities for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading candidate for dark matter. Understanding dark matter, which constitutes the majority of the universe's mass, is one of the key challenges in modern physics.
Szydagis added, "It's often misunderstood what is meant by the phrase 'world's best dark matter experiment,' since no one has made a conclusive, unambiguous discovery yet. However, new, stricter null results like LZ's are still extremely valuable for science. UAlbany, as part of the multinational collaboration that is LZ, has been making important contributions ensuring the robustness of LZ's results, going back to the very beginning of the experiment."
UAlbany's LZ team currently includes postdoctoral researcher Meghna Kannichankandy and PhD students Greg Blockinger and Abantika Ghosh. The team has played a vital role in assembly, calibrations, simulations, and data analysis. Former team members include Alvine Kamaha, Greg Rischbieter, and Nishat Parveen.
'If it were easy, someone would have done it already'
Despite its invisibility, dark matter is fundamental to understanding the universe's structure and behavior. It is believed to account for roughly 85 percent of the universe's mass, influencing the formation and movement of galaxies. Researchers rely on the concept of dark matter to explain large-scale cosmic phenomena, including the universe's expansion.
Levy pointed out that UAlbany scientists have been contributing to the LZ project for over a decade.
"Working on LZ is always so exciting, even if we still have not made a discovery yet," Levy said. "We all know that if it were easy, someone else would have done it already! I think right now what we need to take out of this result is that LZ is a great team of scientists, our detector is working superbly, our analysis is extremely robust and we are nowhere near done taking data."
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