Individual contributors are becoming less prominent in scholarly fields as the discipline itself matures. Some individuals still hold the public spotlight for their discoveries, such as Peter Higgs with the Higgs boson, which several other physicists also theorized around the same time he did. However, the actual data that eventually earned Dr. Higgs and Francois Engler their Nobel Prize was collected by the Large Hadron Collider, perhaps one of the largest engineering projects of all, taking thousands of scientists decades to design, build, and test. .
Subatomic particles aren’t the only things that need large, sophisticated detectors to study. Using an underground research facility in South Dakota, a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed, deployed and tested the world’s most sensitive dark matter detection system.
The project, known as LUX-ZEPLIN or LZ, has a history that would give any project manager nightmares. A team of 250 scientists and engineers from 35 different institutions collaborated on the project, whose primary detector was delivered to the underground home in South Dakota just before the COVID pandemic forced many of those participants to remain in home institutions for the next two years.
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UT video explaining the dark matter hunt.
Despite all the LZ’s problems, in December 2021 it was officially brought online and started collecting data. These data form the basis of a recent paper proving that LZ is the most sensitive dark matter detector ever built.
That doesn’t mean he actually saw any dark matter on his first run. Proverbially difficult to detect using any method other than gravity, dark matter remains an enigma to this day. But scientists have perfected a detection methodology that they believe will help them better understand it, and it is this technology that underlies the LZ system.
Inside the main LZ detector. This is usually filled with liquid xenon. Credit – Matthew Cabbage
A giant tank filled with liquid xenon makes up the bulk of the system, with an array of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) that can detect when one of the countless xenon atoms is struck by a particle that can “mimic a dark matter signal.” In this case, the atom lights up, which is then detected by one of the PMTs, which can also isolate the spatial region and direction in which the particle is moving.
If the detector itself were above ground, too many of these particles would create too much noise compared to the dark matter signal. Hence why the detector is located below the Earth’s surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). SURF also hosts other sensitive experiments that take advantage of the shielding provided by Earth’s surface, so the LZ fits right in with the rest.
Schematic (left) and illustration (right) of the LZ experiment in operation. credit – LZ Collaboration / LZ / SLAC
LZ has only been in operation for a few months so far, but even these results excite the team that originally designed and built the detector. However, there is still a lot of science to be done, with the current plan to collect 20 times more data than ever before. Given the difficulty of detecting dark matter and the general tendency in science that more data is better, this sounds like an excellent proposition for finding dark matter, if it exists. Perhaps the experiment with the Latin word for light in the name will be the first to shed light on the mystery of dark matter.
Learn more: SURF – Researchers record successful launch of LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter detector at Sanford Underground Research FacilityLBNL – The dark matter experiment LZ UT – New dark matter detector scores a blank in first test RoundUT – Searching for dark matter inside Earth
Lead image: Some of the team members responsible for the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment. Credit – Matthew Cabbage
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