LUX-ZEPLIN

Read the travelogue of a xenon atom as it journeys from the air we breathe to a dark-matter detector a mile underground.

From Forbes, Feb. 12, 2021: In June 2020, results from an experiment located in Italy suggested that dark matter may have been directly observed. Another experiment, conducted in China, has announced consistent data. Has dark matter been discovered? Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln explains why we’ll only know in retrospect using the next generation of detectors.

Department of Energy officials have formally signed off on project completion for LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ: an ultrasensitive experiment that will use 10 metric tons of liquid xenon to hunt for signals of interactions with theorized dark matter particles called WIMPs.

The LUX-ZEPLIN collaboration has published results showing radioactive background levels for experiment’s components, creating a library for future rare event searches.

From Forbes, Oct. 30, 2019: Dark matter was proposed in the 1930s and has eluded detection for nearly a century. However, an advanced and high-tech detector called LUX-ZEPLIN has just been installed that might change all of that. Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln gives an overview of the experiment.

The cryostat for Berkeley Lab’s LUX-ZEPLIN experiment — the largest direct-detection dark matter experiment in the U.S. — is successfully moved to its research cavern. This final journey of LZ’s central detector on Oct. 21 to its resting place in a custom-built research cavern required extensive planning and involved two test moves of a “dummy” detector to ensure its safe delivery.

Major deliveries in June set the stage for the next phase of work on LUX-ZEPLIN project, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A Fermilab group is responsible for implementing key parts of the critical systems that handle the xenon in the detector.

These international projects, selected during the process to plan the future of U.S. particle physics, are all set to come online within the next 10 years.

A video from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory explains how the upcoming LZ experiment will search for the missing 85 percent of the matter in the universe.

LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), a next-generation dark matter detector that will be at least 100 times more sensitive than its predecessor, has cleared another approval milestone and is on schedule to begin its deep-underground hunt for theoretical particles, known as weakly interacting massive particles, in 2020.