"SPECIAL PARTICLE PHYSICS SEMINAR: Direct searches for Dark Matter with the LUX and LZ detectors"

 

 

 

The LUX experiment searches for direct evidence of galactic dark matter. Located roughly 1.5 km underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota (USA), the heart of the experiment is a 370 kg liquid-xenon target, instrumented as a dual-phase  time projection chamber capable of 3-D position reconstruction and nuclear recoil discrimination. The initial science results reached a record-setting sensitivity to Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), excluding WIMP-nucleon couplings greater than 7.6e-46 cm^2 for WIMPs of mass 33 GeV. This null result strongly rules out dark-matter interpretations of anomalous features seen in the data of several less-sensitive experiments.  I will discuss these results, and present re-analysis efforts aimed at lowering the detection threshold, which will further lower allowable cross section at low masses. Finally, I will discuss plans for the next generation detector called LZ, which will have a fiducial target mass of ~6,000 kg, thus making it the ultimate dark matter search experiment.