About the Liquid Noble Dark Matter Group

In 1933, Fritz Zwicky realized that most of the matter in the Coma galaxy cluster was invisible. This finding launched a decades-long search for dark matter. Observation after observation has confirmed that if our current understanding of gravity holds that this mysterious matter must exist and in fact makes up about a quarter of our universe. However, we have yet to identify its specific nature.

A leading hypothesis is that dark matter is composed of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs. LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) will search for these particles by looking for evidence of WIMPs colliding with xenon nuclei inside the LZ detector, located 4850 feet underground in South Dakota's Sanford Underground Research Facility. (This search is similar to the one undertaken by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search.)

The group at SLAC plays a major role in operating the experiment and analyzing data to look for dark matter. The group also played an instrumental role in designing, fabricating and carrying out the experiment. The laboratory has a test platform that was used to test LZ prototype detectors and serves as a tool for R&D for potential next generation xenon dark matter experiment. The SLAC group was responsible for purifying the liquid xenon that will be used in the detector, since radio-pure xenon is needed to ensure that the experiment can see the very faint signal of a dark matter particle behind the higher rate from natural radiation sources. 

SLAC also played an important role in the LZ’s predecessor, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment. SLAC is also leading R&D efforts for future xenon dark matter experiments.