Shining Light on the Dark Matter Question Using LZ

by Matthew Szydagis (The University at Albany, SUNY)

Tuesday 14 Jan 2025, 15:30 → 17:30 US/Eastern

The mystery of dark matter is one of the greatest puzzles in modern science. What is 85% of the matter, or 25% of the mass/energy, of the universe made up of? No human knows for certain. Despite mountains of evidence from astrophysics and cosmology, direct laboratory detection eludes physicists. A leading candidate to explain dark matter is the WIMP or Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, a thermal relic left over after the Big Bang. I will be presenting the latest search results, new limits, from the LZ experiment deployed in South Dakota. It is one of the flagship US DOE dark matter projects and involves researchers from 6 countries and 4 continents. LZ currently has a world-leading sensitivity to WIMP interaction cross sections above 9 GeV WIMP mass. I will also cover some of the other analyses in different channels, while describing the careful calibrations of backgrounds and potential signals, and the Noble Element Simulation Technique (NEST) software created to model interactions in detectors like LZ. However, to reach the “neutrino fog,” a larger scale will be needed. This leads to the need for a third-generation experiment, so I will also discuss XLZD.

Zoom link:

https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1605020278?pwd=cHJ1bDRuK1FDNnZLSnpxVkZhcDQ3QT09 

Passcode E=mc2

Numerical passcode: 072826