{"id":624687,"date":"2026-09-14T20:18:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T20:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/624687\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T20:18:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T20:18:13","slug":"lz-experiment-may-have-detected-dark-matter-for-the-first-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/624687\/","title":{"rendered":"LZ experiment may have detected dark matter for the first time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n An international team of scientists says it has detected an intriguing signal that could hint at evidence of dark matter<\/a>, offering a clue that might bring the mystery of the elusive substance one step closer to a solution.\n <\/p>\n

\n Dark matter makes up about 85% of all the matter in the universe and is about five times<\/a> as abundant as ordinary matter, which makes up stars, planets and everything else that scientists can see. Dark matter is invisible because it does not absorb or reflect light, but it does interact with regular matter, and its gravitational effects are needed to explain the structure of the universe.\n <\/p>\n

\n For nearly half a century \u2014 since American astronomers Vera Rubin and W. Kent Ford provided some of the strongest evidence<\/a> for dark matter\u2019s existence \u2014 scientists have tried to identify the unseen substance, more recently using sophisticated devices designed to detect potential candidates.\n <\/p>\n

\n One of these devices is the LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ, experiment<\/a> \u2014 a detector containing 7 active metric tons of liquid xenon that\u2019s in a former gold mine nearly a mile (about 1.5 kilometers) below Earth\u2019s surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. The detector registered an unusual particle interaction<\/a> in June 2023 that generated a flash of light and cautious excitement.\n <\/p>\n

\n The LZ collaboration is an international group of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions. After months of analysis, the team estimates only a 0.5% chance that a known source of interference caused the event \u2014 making this signal the most compelling hint<\/a> of dark matter the instrument has ever recorded.\n <\/p>\n

\n However, in scientific terms, claiming a discovery requires a much higher degree of confidence. \u201cOne event, by itself, is not enough,\u201d Alvine Kamaha, an assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an email.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe need to see whether additional events appear as we collect more data and whether the statistical significance of the observation increases,\u201d said Kamaha, a member of the LZ collaboration who helped build<\/a> the LZ detector.\n <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\n Sam Eriksen, a senior research associate of physics at the University of Bristol and member of the LZ collaboration, presented the findings<\/a> September 1 at the TeV Particle Astrophysics 2026<\/a> conference in Japan, and the team has submitted a study<\/a> for publication in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.\n <\/p>\n

\n The researchers are already working on further analysis that could potentially increase the statistical significance of the event. The threshold to claim a discovery in particle physics is known as 5-sigma, which means about a 1 in 3.5 million chance of a statistical fluke rather than a real hint of dark matter. The analysis is currently at 2.6-sigma, or a 1 in 200 chance of a fluke.\n <\/p>\n

\n A definitive detection of dark matter would be \u201ca major breakthrough,\u201d Kamaha said. \u201cWe know that dark matter plays a fundamental role in the formation of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe, but we still do not know what it actually is,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting because it would open an entirely new area of particle physics.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n There are several candidates for what dark matter could be, including primordial black holes<\/a> or an undiscovered particle. Detectors such as the LZ experiment search for a class of hypothetical particles called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.\n <\/p>\n

\n If they exist, WIMPs pass through regular matter without interacting with it, and vast numbers of them could pass unnoticed through a human body every second. On rare occasions, however, one such particle could collide with an atomic nucleus and produce a tiny recoil \u2014 precisely the kind of event the LZ experiment is designed to detect.\n <\/p>\n

\n The detector uses highly purified liquid xenon<\/a>. Researchers selected this element because its atoms have heavy nuclei that make it a particularly sensitive target for WIMPs. Collisions in xenon produce signals the detector can easily measure.\n <\/p>\n

\n The LZ experiment is located deep underground and equipped with protective layers to shield it from cosmic rays and other sources of radiation, which could produce signals similar to dark matter. However, this background noise can only be reduced, not eliminated.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cYou\u2019re always going to be in a situation where it\u2019s possible that events occurring in your detector are due to more conventional mechanisms,\u201d said Rick Gaitskell, Hazard Professor of Physics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the spokesperson for the LZ experiment.\n <\/p>\n

\n Potential dark matter collisions are believed to be extremely rare. \u201cOur understanding is that dark matter is so weakly interacting with conventional material,\u201d Gaitskell added, \u201cthat even in a detector of the scale of the LZ experiment we need to look for periods of months or years per single interaction.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The LZ collaboration spotted the 2023 event through an analysis of 220 days of data, collected between March 2023 and April 2024. The researchers are now working through a more recent dataset spanning 700 days, Gaitskell said, hoping it contains further collisions that could help determine whether the 2023 event was a dark matter interaction.\n <\/p>\n

\n For this larger analysis, the team is also introducing techniques to avoid unconscious bias, for example by inserting \u201csynthetic events\u201d in the data. These look like genuine dark matter interactions to the analysis team and are only removed after the analysis is completed.\n <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n \u201cA possible detection brings a lot of tension between the excitement of the experiment working the way we imagined it would, with the worry that we could make mistakes, or just simply be fooled by something rare and new or coincidental happening in the detector,\u201d said Kimberly Palladino, a professor of physics at England\u2019s University of Oxford and a member of the LZ collaboration, in an email. \u201cIt\u2019s a little like having a crush on someone as a teenager where you tell yourself to act cool, but have the tendency to over-interpret every little gesture they make.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n However, Palladino warned, history is also littered with experiments that have seen one or two unexplained events that are never fully understood. If the new LZ data contains new potential dark matter collisions, similar experiments also designed to detect dark matter, such as the XENONnT in Italy<\/a> and the PandaX-4T in China<\/a>, could provide an independent test of the results.\n <\/p>\n

\n Finding dark matter would bring scientists a big step closer to understanding what the universe is made of and how it evolved from the big bang to present day.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cBut a lot more scientists will need to study dark matter to understand its properties in a variety of different experiments, and then using that information, run astrophysical simulations of our universe,\u201d Palladino added. \u201cThere are many theories about what dark matter can be, and there may be multiple types of dark matter.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

A lot still to do and learn<\/p>\n

\n The LZ experiment\u2019s potential detection of dark matter is intriguing but needs confirmation, according to Tim M.P. Tait, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, who\u2019s not part of the LZ collaboration.\n <\/p>\n

\"To<\/p>\n

\n \u201cOnly time can tell whether they will see more events as the detector accumulates more data, or if this will turn out to be a temporary statistical fluke,\u201d Tait added in an email. He noted that the LZ event occurred at a much higher energy than most models expect for WIMPs, meaning dark matter could \u201cturn out to be more weird and wonderful than even we had originally imagined.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Tracy Slatyer, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agrees that further data analysis is needed to understand whether the LZ event is dark matter. \u201cIf this is dark matter,\u201d Slatyer, who is not involved with the LZ collaboration, added in an email, \u201cthe fact that the event is at quite a high energy, without accompanying events at lower energy, is very interesting.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The energy measured in the LZ event indicates how much the xenon nucleus recoiled due to the potential interaction with the dark matter. A high-energy dark matter particle, Slatyer explained, would already reveal quite a bit about the nature of dark matter and how it interacts with ordinary particles. Other experiments could potentially help pin down its properties further.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThere would be a lot still to do and learn, but if this really is a dark matter signal,\u201d she said, \u201cthis could be a key that unlocks a great deal of information about new physics, as well as giving us a new way to measure the behavior of dark matter in the neighborhood of the Earth and possibly more broadly through the cosmos.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Sign up for CNN\u2019s Wonder Theory science newsletter<\/a>. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An international team of scientists says it has detected an intriguing signal that could hint at evidence of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-624687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}