New Super-Sensitive Dark Matter Detector Booted
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experimental team has announced the results of its first scientific test today; the experiment is the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector, and although it didn’t find any dark matter in this first round, the team confirmed that the experiment worked as expected. The LZ experimental detector consists of nested liquid xenon tanks, each 1.5 meters high and 1.5 meters wide, buried beneath North Dakota. The idea is that a dark matter particle streaking through space will eventually bounce off one of the xenon atoms, knocking the electron loose in the instant the experiment recorded. The tank is buried about a mile below the earth’s surface to minimize the amount of background noise. Today’s announcement comes after 60 days of live data collection that ran from December 25 to May 12. “We are looking for very, very low energy recoil by particle physics standards. This is a very, very rare process, if seen at all,” Hugh Lippincott, a phys...