An international team of scientists working with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment has detected a rare particle interaction that is difficult to explain as background noise. The event, recorded between March 2023 and April 2024, occurred in a region where dark matter signals are expected. While not yet a discovery, researchers call it the most compelling potential dark matter signal observed by LZ to date.
The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, a collaboration of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions, is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The detector, located nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota, contains 10 tonnes of extremely pure liquid xenon. It was designed to search for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, a leading candidate for dark matter.
The findings were presented at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan and will be published in arXiv and Physical Review Letters. Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University and the spokesperson for LZ, stated, “We're very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low.” He cautioned, “With only one event, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.”
Researchers analyzed 220 live days of observations for this study. They had previously examined the same dataset.
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