09/01/2026
The LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ, experiment has reported a compelling result in its search for dark matter. Although the result doesn't meet the statistical threshold for claiming a discovery of dark matter, LZ's international research team, including members from the University of Michigan, cannot currently explain it with known background signals.
"It's certainly not evidence that we've seen dark matter, and maybe it's too much to say that it's even a hint, but it's interesting enough that we're going to pursue it with our full strength," Wolfgang Lorenzon said. Lorenzon, a professor in the U-M Department of Physics, is the principal investigator of the U-M dark matter group and has been working on the LZ experiment since 2015.
The LZ collaboration includes 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions. The detector is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or Berkeley Lab, and operates nearly one mile below ground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, or SURF, in South Dakota. The experiment uses 10 metric tons of ultrapure liquid xenon to search for dark matter and is optimized to look for weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.
The new results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan. The paper will be released on the online repository arXiv and submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.
“We’re very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low,” said Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University and the spokesperson for LZ. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.”
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