RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – Nearly a mile beneath the floor of Western South Dakota, one of many world’s most delicate physics experiments is quietly listening for alerts from the unseen universe with researchers from South Dakota Mines and Technology serving to information each pulse it data, together with the most recent record-breaking outcomes.
The worldwide collaboration is made up of 250 scientists and engineers from 37 establishments, and so they introduced this week world main outcomes that considerably slender the attainable properties of weakly interacting large particles (WIMPs), a number one candidate for darkish matter.
At the identical time the experiment achieved a significant milestone by detecting the boron 8 photo voltaic neutrinos, offering the detector’s first glimpse at the “neutrino fog” – alerts from neutrinos that mimic these regarded as produced by darkish matter.
The LZ experiment makes use of 10 metric tonnes, or 10,000 kilograms, of ultra-pure liquid xenon to seek for the faint interactions anticipated from darkish matter.
The newly launched evaluation is predicated on the 417 dwell days of knowledge collected between March 2023 and April 2025, the most important dataset ever used in darkish matter analysis.
The outcomes discovered no signal of WIMPs with a mass between 3 GeV/c2, roughly the mass of three protons, and 9 GeV/c2.
Researchers from Mines, one of many 37 collaborative establishments, made key contributions to the experiment’s success.
Juergen Reichenbacher, Ph.D., an affiliate professor in the Mines physics division, began working with the LZ experiment in 2012.
Reichenbacher and his group targeted on calibration supply characterization and deployment, correcting the sign losses and implementing distant management capabilities to function the LZ detector deep underground.
“Without regularly calibrating the detector, we would basically fly blindly and could not possibly interpret the data that LZ recorded up to now in a meaningful way,” Reichenbacher stated.
Reichenbacher’s analysis scientist Gleb Sinev, Ph.D., leads the group chargeable for LZ’s distant system management of the detector. “One could reasonably argue that comprehensive remote-control capabilities to operate and monitor the LZ detector underground 24/7 have been mission-critical to record enough quality data in time to be able to come out now with our new world-leading result,” he stated.
Richard Schnee, Ph.D., head of the physics division at Mines, is among the many main researchers in the world on radon discount for ultra-sensitive physics experiments like LZ. Schnee led the design and construct group for a important system that eliminated radon from the LZ cavern.
“People in the general public might have heard about the health hazards of radon levels in their basements, but for dark matter searchers underground, this background could ruin the results if not mitigated,” Schnee stated.
Sagar Sharma Poudel, a postdoctoral researcher with Schnee, contributed to detector calibration, information evaluation and low-energy pulse evaluation.
“I find it exciting that the LZ experiment is publishing world-leading limits in WIMPs dark matter detection,” Poudel stated. “I am happy to have contributed to some aspects of the experiment, both in operations and on the analysis side.”
Beyond darkish matter, LZ’s excessive sensitivity allowed scientists to look at boron-8 photo voltaic neutrinos, offering a window into how neutrinos work together and the nuclear reactions produced by fusion in the solar’s core by means of a uncommon course of referred to as coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS).
The remark reached the 4.5-sigma confidence stage – the strongest proof so far for this interplay in xenon and an vital validation of detector efficiency.
While neutrinos current a background problem for future low-mass darkish matter searches, their detection additionally opens new alternatives for finding out neutrino physics and processes occurring in the solar’s core.
LZ will proceed amassing information by means of at least 2028, greater than doubling its publicity and additional increasing its attain into uncharted physics territory. The collaboration can also be serving to design a next-generation detector that may construct on LZ’s success to probe darkish matter, neutrinos and different uncommon phenomena with even higher sensitivity.
LZ is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science consumer facility.
LZ can also be supported by the Science & Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology; the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Institute for Basic Science, Korea.
Over 38 establishments of upper schooling and superior analysis supplied assist to LZ. The LZ collaboration acknowledges the help of the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
This launch was first printed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the unique may be discovered on their web site here.
See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.
Do you could have a photograph or video of a breaking information story? Send it to us here with a short description.
Copyright 2025 KOTA. All rights reserved.