Author: Luiz de Viveiros

It’s a productive start to 2020 for the LZ collaboration – this week we are meeting at @RutherfordApLab in the UK! An exciting year lies ahead as we get nearer to completing construction and beginning the search for #darkmatter pic.twitter.com/R1b1on2zgi

— LZ Dark Matter (@lzdarkmatter) January 6, 2020

October 31st is International Dark Matter Day!  The Dark Matter and Neutrinos group at Penn State hosted an information booth at the HUB (the main student center in the university), to talk to people about Dark Matter, Cosmology, and Physics in general!  We had quite a number of people stopping by, and some lively discussions! In the spirit of Halloween, we also distributed some chocolate – dark, of course 😉

Below are some pictures of the event, with Profs. Carmen Carmona and Luiz de Viveiros; Dan Kodroff, Gavin Cox, and Andrew Ziegler, graduate students with our group; Rachel Ratvasky and Jake Miller, undergraduate students with our group; and Michael Ryan, graduate student researching Black Holes made of Dark Matter (!) with Prof. Sarah Shandera.

 

Our paper on the gamma rays in the Davis cavern at @SanfordLab has been published in Astroparticle Physics!

We measured high energy gamma rays emitted through radioactivity in the cavern walls to help characterize the backgrounds for LZ. https://t.co/3K8cnRt9BT #DarkMatter

— LZ Dark Matter (@lzdarkmatter) October 31, 2019

Q: How do you get a 5,000-pound, 9-foot-tall particle detector, designed to hunt for dark matter, nearly a mile underground?
A: Very carefully.

Video of the LZ detector being moved underground:

LZ takes a deep dive! We have reached a huge milestone – the LZ detector made it safely underground at @SanfordLab! We’re 4850 feet closer to detecting #darkmatter ✨

Check out @BerkeleyLab’s article and video on the move: https://t.co/U3u01HxIUK pic.twitter.com/Zfd27LitZ1

— LZ Dark Matter (@lzdarkmatter) October 29, 2019

Everything you ever wanted to know about the LZ detector – and then some! Our detector paper is now on arXiv: https://t.co/HtduhKIlTd #darkmatter pic.twitter.com/uTzbEwAPAP

— LZ Dark Matter (@lzdarkmatter) October 22, 2019

The Dark Matter and Neutrinos Group at Penn State will be hosting a Dark Matter Day event at the HUB on October 31st, 2019! We will have an information booth at the lobby from 10am to 4pm, to explore the science of dark matter and the experiments looking for it! Speakers include Profs. Carmen Carmona and Luiz de Viveiros, and several graduate students working on Dark Matter detection experiments!

#DYK that searches for #DarkMatter range from massive particle colliders, to deep underground experiments, to detectors in space!

Video: @lzdarkmatter @SanfordLab https://t.co/JRKOAMN0oA

Find out more about this experiment and others around the world: https://t.co/Zwsgalu2hL pic.twitter.com/IGMSh4eqRQ

— Dark Matter Day (@DarkMatterDay) October 11, 2019

October is Dark Matter month! All around the globe, research labs are gearing up for the 3rd annual #DarkMatterDay on October 31st. Find everything from live webcasts to dark matter pumpkin searches: https://t.co/rKIutXwrdz pic.twitter.com/JlZVYrHPdt

— Dark Matter Day (@DarkMatterDay) September 27, 2019

Th LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Collaboration has finished putting together the Time-Projection Chamber, the ‘heart’ of the LZ dark matter detector.  The TPC is very complex system, and it’s a major achievement to have it fully assembled:
https://www.sanfordlab.org/article/lz-time-projection-chamber-assembly-completed

What do you get if you combine thousands of precision-engineered pieces, expertise from around the world, and many hours of hard work in a cleanroom? The world’s biggest, cleanest TPC – towering 9ft tall at the frontier of rare event searches!@SanfordLabhttps://t.co/UZejlTB5Ck pic.twitter.com/VnJjtzfgsp

— LZ Dark Matter (@lzdarkmatter) August 6, 2019