Scientists have just narrowed down the possible hiding places for dark matter particles.
The LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ, experiment has searched for and ruled out the existence of dark matter particles with a wide range of properties, researchers report Aug. 26 at two conferences. Dark matter is a substance whose influence can be seen on the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters, but which has never been directly detected.
LZ searches for a hypothetical type of dark matter particle called a weakly interacting massive particle, specifically WIMPs with masses over 9 billion electron volts. (For comparison, a proton has a mass of about 1 billion electron volts.) The LZ detector, filled with 10 metric tons of liquid xenon, monitors for the recoil of atomic nuclei when WIMPs enter the liquid (SN: 7/7/22).
Researchers characterize WIMPs by their cross section—the probability that a particle will interact. The result reduces the maximum possible cross section to about a fifth allowed by previous results, LZ researchers report at the TeV Particle Astrophysics meeting in Chicago and the Detection of Light in Noble Elements meeting in São Paulo.
“We are making great strides into new territory,” says physicist Chamkaur Ghag of University College London, spokesperson for LZ.
The study was conducted with 280 days of data. LZ’s final results will be based on 1,000 days of data and are expected to further dig into the possibilities of dark matter – or find evidence of it.
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