Deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), an
innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector—the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, led by
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab)— has passed a check-out phase of
startup operations and delivered first results. South Dakota
Mines physicists played an integral role in LZ
by creating technology that reduced the amount of background
radiation that could skew the experiment’s results. They
are continuing to make important contributions by calibrating and analyzing the
experiment.
The take home message from this successful startup:
“We’re ready and everything’s looking good,” said Berkeley Lab Senior Physicist
and past LZ Spokesperson Kevin Lesko. “It’s a complex detector with many parts
to it and they are all functioning well within expectations,” he said.
In a paper posted online,
LZ researchers report that with the initial run, LZ is already the world’s most
sensitive dark matter detector. LZ Spokesperson Hugh Lippincott of the
University of California Santa Barbara said, “We plan to collect about 20 times
more data in the coming years, so we’re only getting ...