Completed Physics & Astronomy Materials & Manufacturing

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter Search

Funder STFC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Imperial College London
Funding £2.4M
Period Mar 2015 — Oct 2019

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Deep inside a South Dakota gold mine, a seven-tonne tank of liquid xenon is waiting for a ghost to bump into it. This experiment, called LZ, is searching for dark matter—the invisible substance that makes up most of the universe’s mass but has never been directly detected. Physicists know dark matter exists because galaxies spin too fast to hold together without extra gravity, but they do not know what it is made of. One leading idea is that dark matter consists of Weakly Interactive Massive Particles, or WIMPs, which would very rarely collide with ordinary atoms. LZ is built to catch those collisions. If LZ succeeds, it would solve one of the biggest open questions in fundamental science: the nature of dark matter. That would transform our understanding of how galaxies form and what the universe is made of. There is no immediate practical application—this is pure curiosity-driven research. But past fundamental discoveries about the unseen world, from quantum mechanics to nuclear physics, have led to technologies that now underpin everything from medical imaging to computer chips. A deeper understanding of dark matter could, in time, open doors no one can yet predict.

View original technical description
Direct dark matter experiments search for the extremely rare and very faint collisions expected to occur between the cold dark matter particles that are believed to permeate our galaxy and the nuclei of atoms in the active medium of a radiation detector. Weakly Interactive Massive Particles, or WIMPs, are hypothetical elementary particles weighing as little as a few protons or as much as several heavy nuclei; besides gravity, they would interact by the weak nuclear force, thereby providing a mechanics for their possible detection. The motivation to search for WIMP dark matter is strong, with theories that attempt to explain what lies beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics providing very good candidates. The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment will deploy a 7-tonne liquid xenon WIMP detector at the 4850-foot level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) after a 3-year construction phase. In this most quiet of environments, shielded from cosmic rays and local backgrounds, LZ will then operate for at least 3 years to hopefully find a handful of tell-tale signs of WIMP interactions. LZ will be so sensitive that it will be limited only by backgrounds from astrophysical neutrinos, which provide a fundamental limit to these searches. However, before neutrinos set in, this experiment has the potential to finally shed light on the nature of dark matter.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Henrique Araujo (Principal Investigator)Timothy Sumner (Co-Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

The LZ Dark Matter Experiment
Direct Dark Matter Search with LUC-ZEPLIN Experiment
WIMP Dark Matter Searches with the LUX-ZEPLIN Experiment
LZ dark matter experiment.
The LZ Dark Matter Search Experiment

Original classification

Research Grant

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.