Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has passed the startup operations phase and delivered first results of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector.
LZ
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.
As she grew up in the small town of San Pellegrino in the Italian Alps, three things conspired to make Maria Elena Monzani a physicist: a fascination for outer space, a Nobel Prize and a nuclear disaster. Now she prepares an international team to search for clues to one of the biggest scientific mysteries.
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.
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment is advancing technology commonly used in dark matter experiments—and scaling it up to record-breaking sizes.
From STFC, July 17, 2018: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory delivers components for the LZ experiment in the Sanford Underground Research Laboratory.