Author: Luiz de Viveiros

Dan Kodroff, our grad student here at Penn State, is a corresponding author on the new paper reporting on the backgrounds for the LZ dark matter experiment during the “First Science Run” (SR1), which we recently reported on (LZ First Science Run Results!).  This is a fantastic achievement for Dan, as being a lead author on such a big and important paper in LZ as a grad student is quite uncommon!

Particles such as gammas, electrons, neutrons, and neutrinos, can create signals in the LZ detector that can look like dark matter – we call these “backgrounds”. Understanding these backgrounds is essential in order to look for dark matter. In this paper, we report our expected and measured backgrounds, as well as the models we use to characterize the observed signals and determine how likely they are to be either a background or dark matter.

“Background Determination for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter Experiment” – https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.17120

Penn State is hosting the meeting of the APS Mid-Atlantic Section this weekend! Carmen gave a talk on dark matter detection with the LZ experiment, and Luiz gave a talk on measuring the neutrino mass with Project 8.

https://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAS22/

Luiz and Andrew are at Indiana University this week, for the Collaboration Meeting and Workshop of the Project 8 Neutrino Mass Experiment! It has been great to get together and do some science in person again!

Dark Matter Day is celebrated on the day of Halloween 🎃, because, you know, dark matter is mysterious and spooky 😉. So to mark this day, we held an event at the HUB today, with an informational booth from 10am until 2pm. We had many students stop by to ask about it, and we were happy to talk to them about dark matter, about the many experiments here at Penn State working on trying to understand and detect dark matter, and about cosmology and physics in general!

Thanks to the team who helped make it happen: Sarah, Michael, Dan, Gus, and Luiz!

Some photos below:

The Dark Matter and Neutrinos Group at Penn State will be hosting a Dark Matter Day event at the HUB Student Center on October 31st, 2022! We will have an information booth at the lobby from 10am to 2pm, to explore the science of dark matter and the experiments looking for it! Speakers include Profs. Carmen Carmona, Luiz de Viveiros, Sarah Shandera, and several students working on Dark Matter experiments!

Dark Matter Day

Don’t be Afraid of The Dark!

Carmen has been elected as the Chair of the Institutional Board for the LZ dark matter experiment. The Institutional Board (IB) is composed of senior members of each Institutional Group, and is responsible for guiding the scientific strategy of the LZ experiment, and electing or appointing various leadership positions within LZ. Congratulations Carmen!

Last week, our group was at the “Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics” (CIPANP22) in Orlando, Florida!  Luiz de Viveiros gave an overview of the Project 8 experiment, explaining how we can use it to measure the neutrino mass, and the R&D we are working on to build our next-generation detector! David Woodward presented the latest results from LZ, reporting on the results obtained from our first dark matter search run of 60 live-days, demonstrating that we are the biggest and best dark matter experiment in the world!

https://agenda.hep.wisc.edu/event/1644/overview

After nearly a decade of design and construction, we’re excited to be presenting the detector performance and early science results from the LZ Dark Matter experiment! The results were presented in a webinar on July 7th, 2022, and a recording of the presentation can be found on YouTube.  The paper describing our results can be found on the LZ Website.  The Press Release from Penn State can be found in the following links: Penn State News and Penn State Eberly College of Science News.

No dark matter was detected yet, but we have demonstrated that we are now the world’s largest and most sensitive dark matter detector!

More results to follow!

There was no evidence for a dark matter signal in our first science run, so we have set world-leading constraints on WIMP properties.

Solid black: observed limit
Dashed-black: median expected sensitivity pic.twitter.com/5vpeSZJ5D1

— LZ Dark Matter (@lzdarkmatter) July 7, 2022

The LZ Results Webinar is this Thursday July 7th, 2022!  Link below:

👀 pic.twitter.com/5hhDknkHJF

— LZ Dark Matter (@lzdarkmatter) July 5, 2022

Profs. Carmen Carmona and David Woodward of the Penn State group participated this week at the Conference on Science at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (CoSSURF 2022), in Rapid City, South Dakota.  The conference was focused on discussing the science of the SURF underground laboratory in nearby Lead, SD, which hosts a number of experiments including our LZ dark matter experiment.  Carmen gave an invited talk presenting an overview and status update of the LZ experiment, and David presented a talk on the bias mitigation (“salting”) strategy for the analysis of the LZ data.

https://indico.sanfordlab.org/event/28/