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Record-Setting Dark Matter Detector Comes Up Empty -- and That's Good News
Wednesday July 9, 2025. 03:00 PM , from Slashdot
![]() The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, located one mile underground in a decommissioned South Dakota gold mine, employs nearly 15,000 pounds (7 tons) of liquid xenon. The chemical element's high atomic mass and density make it potentially easier for scientists to detect any unknown particles that may pass through the detector. Also, liquid xenon is transparent, preventing any unwanted noise -- usually arising from radioactive matter around the detector -- from spoiling an experiment. 'These results firmly establish that LZ is the world's most sensitive search for dark matter heavier than 10 GeV, that's about 10 times heavier than a proton,' explained Scott Haselschwart, a physicist at the University of Michigan and LZ physics coordinator, in an email to Gizmodo. 'To put our result in perspective: we have ruled out dark matter that would interact only once in a single kilogram of xenon every four millennia!' 'LZ is the most sensitive search for WIMP dark matter to date, but we still have another two years of data to collect,' Haselschwart said. 'This means that a discovery of dark matter in LZ could come anytime now. We are truly looking for dark matter where no one has ever looked before and that is extremely exciting!' Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/07/08/2255240/record-setting-dark-matter-detector-comes-up-emp...
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