LZ Experiment Sets New Record in Search for Dark Matter

Figuring out the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most of the mass in our universe, is one of the greatest puzzles in physics. New results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), have narrowed down possibilities for one of the leading dark matter candidates: weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.

LZ, led by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), hunts for dark matter from a cavern nearly one mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. The experiment's new results explore weaker dark matter interactions than ever searched before and further limit what WIMPs could be.

"These are new world-leading constraints by a sizable margin on dark matter and WIMPs," said Chamkaur Ghag, spokesperson for LZ and a professor at University College London (UCL). He noted that the detector and analysis techniques are performing even better than the collaboration expected. "If WIMPs had been within the region we searched, we'd have been able to robustly say something about them. We know we have the sensitivity and tools to see whether they're there as we search lower energies and accrue the bulk of this experiment's lifetime."

The collaboration found no evidence of WIMPs above a mass of 9 gigaelectronvolts/c² (GeV/c²). (For comparison, the mass of a proton is slightly less than 1 GeV/c².) The experiment's sensitivity to faint interactions helps researchers reject potential WIMP dark matter models that don't fit the data, leaving significantly fewer places for WIMPs to hide. The new results were presented at two physics conferences on August 26: TeV Particle Astrophysics 2024 in Chicago, Illinois, and LIDINE 2024 in São Paulo, Brazil. A scientific paper will be published in the coming weeks.

The results analyze 280 days' worth of data: a new set of 220 days (collected between March 2023 and April 2024) combined with 60 earlier days from LZ's first run. The experiment plans to collect 1,000 days' worth of data before it ends in 2028.

"If you think of the search for dark matter like looking for buried treasure, we've dug almost five times deeper than anyone else has in the past," said Scott Kravitz, LZ's deputy physics coordinator and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. "That's something you don't do with a million shovels - you do it by inventing a new tool."

LZ's sensitivity comes from the myriad ways the detector can reduce backgrounds, the false signals that can impersonate or hide a dark matter interaction. Deep underground, the detector is shielded from cosmic rays coming from space. To reduce natural radiation from everyday objects, LZ was built from thousands of ultraclean, low-radiation parts. The detector is built like an onion, with each layer either blocking outside radiation or tracking particle interactions to rule out dark matter mimics. And sophisticated new analysis techniques help rule out background interactions, particularly those from the most common culprit: radon.

This result is also the first time that LZ has applied "salting" - a technique that adds fake WIMP signals during data collection. By camouflaging the real data until "unsalting" at the very end, researchers can avoid unconscious bias and keep from overly interpreting or changing their analysis.

"We're pushing the boundary into a regime where people have not looked for dark matter before," said Scott Haselschwardt, the LZ physics coordinator and a recent Chamberlain Fellow at Berkeley Lab who is now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. "There's a human tendency to want to see patterns in data, so it's really important when you enter this new regime that no bias wanders in. If you make a discovery, you want to get it right."

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