Author: Luiz de Viveiros

The Penn State group participates in the Neutrino Day 2019!

Neutrino Day is the science festival organized by the Sanford Laboratory in Lead, SD, where the LZ dark matter detector is located.  Penn State graduate students Dan Kodroff and Gavin Cox volunteered to help with the festival, hosting a booth to explain the some cosmology and dark matter to visitors!

It’s #NeutrinoDay! 🎉 Make sure you stop by the @SanfordLab Visitor Center and learn all about #darkmatter! LZ will detect #neutrinos too – we will mostly see ones from the sun ☀️. Watch out, they can look just like dark matter in our detector… pic.twitter.com/JpWhBGPDGf

— LZ Dark Matter (@lzdarkmatter) July 13, 2019

More pictures:

The PMT arrays for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment have been successfully assembled – now LZ has its eyes! LZ will have a total of 494 of these extremely sensitive light sensors in the main detector… not to mention 131 more in the xenon skin and 120 in the water tank! LZ is well on its way for starting in 2020!

In preparation to test the xenon circulation system for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment, Dr. David Woodward of Penn State carefully positioned a tower holding a stainless-steel test cryostat. The LZ collaboration will circulate liquid xenon through the test cryostat to ensure the system will work properly when the experiment begins operations in 2020.

Dr. David Woodward of Penn State has been at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota since November, working on the assembly of the LZ Test Cryostat, created by the Penn State group to test the cryogenic and liquid xenon systems of the LZ experiment before the actual detector is in place. Some more details can be found here at the SURF newsletter:

https://www.sanfordlab.org/article/lz-begins-new-phase-testing-xenon-circulation-system

Dr. David Woodward of Penn State went to the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF)in South Dakota since November, to receive and start the assembly of the LZ Test Cryostat, created by the Penn State group to test the cryogenic and liquid xenon systems of the LZ experiment before the actual detector is in place. He has also been working on the assembly of the detector itself, and the photo below shows him placing Teflon panels in the surface of the inner cryostat, used to enhance our light collection!

We have just hosted the LUX Analysis Workshop here at Penn State University! The workshop was chaired by Dr. David Woodward, the LUX Analysis Coordinator and postdoc at Penn State, with help from Profs. Carmen Carmona and Luiz de Viveiros.

The LUX Dark Matter experiment has completed its science run and was disassembled in 2017, to make room for the next generation LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter detector. Although its primary mission has been completed by setting world-leading constraints on Dark Matter cross-sections at the time, it has left a rich dataset that is still being actively mined for new physics, with Penn State leading the charge!

A peek inside the LZ inner cryostat, before the Time-Projection Chamber (TPC, where the events are actually detected) was installed.

If @Apple created @TheRealHAL9000. Just kidding, the @lzdarkmatter experiment gets a fresh set of tiles, especially sensitive to light for better #darkmatter detection. Coming to an @IKEAUSA store near you! pic.twitter.com/joFSuiMioB

— LBNL Physics Division (@LBNLphysics) October 4, 2018

We got a brand new cleanroom in our lab in Davey 019, and we are getting it ready for use! With particle counts better than ISO5 and radon levels better than 0.2 pCi/L (7.4 Bq/m^3), it is ready for use for low background experiments!

Prof. Carmona was elected as one of the four voting members of the LZ Executive Board, a small committee charged with providing leadership and guidance for the LZ experiment (which has more than 250 members!). The responsibilities of the Executive Board include guiding the technical strategy of the collaboration and the experiment, and advising the spokespersons on scientific and financial matters.

Congratulations!

Dr. David Woodward and Corey Herr are at SLAC, getting the LZ dark matter experiment ready to go!  They were working on a test of the thermosyphon system that will be used to cool down the detector and liquify the xenon inside it.

(SLAC is the former “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center”, a national lab located in the bay area in California. It’s part of the LZ Collaboration, and it’s where a lot of the commissioning of the LZ detector is taking place prior to assembly underground in South Dakota!)