LZ Dark Matter

What a weekend!!! We had an amazing time at New Scientist Live in London! Our stand was always so busy and we hope everyone who stopped by had fun and learnt something about the underground hunt for dark matter ✨ 🌌. #NewScientistLive #DarkMatter

It’s almost here!!! We’re so excited to tell you all about #darkmatter at #NewScientistLive this weekend!

#DarkMatter101 #DarkMatter #LZCrashCourse #ParticlePhysics #ScienceSeries #SpaceMysteries #DirectDetection #Astrophysics

Join us next time to find out about the signals we collect and how they can be used to identify dark matter! 🔎🌌

We use an electric field to push ionized electrons into the gas at top of the detector to collect a second flash of light for every particle interaction- more on this next time!

We use photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) as the eyes 👀 of the detector to collect the flashes of light produced by the xenon.

The more xenon we have, the more chance of seeing dark matter...

Xenon is an ideal target for dark matter, and it scintillates ✨ - produces light when particles pass through it.

This lesson is a bit of a shift from the previous ones! So far, we’ve explored how we know dark matter exists and how we might detect it, even though it is invisible to us!

Now we are zooming in on the LZ experiment, which uses three key ingredients to look for dark matter...

🌌 Dark Matter 101: The LZ Crash Course 🚀 | Lesson 4: The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) detector, part 1!

Hello again! It’s time for the fourth installment of our crash course

Collider searches, like at the LHC, look for signatures of dark matter produced in high energy particle collisions.

Ideally, we will see consistent evidence of dark matter particles in all three of these types of searches! ✨

Indirect searches look for particles produced by dark matter annihilating or decaying out in distant space!

LZ is a direct detection experiment, we hope to observe the recoils of dark matter with our liquid xenon target 🎯

Also known as shake it, break it, make it!

There are three main ways in which you can try to detect dark matter:
🎬Direct detection
⚡️Indirect detection
💥Collider production

Lesson number three is all about how we can detect dark matter. In previous lessons we saw that there is a lot of dark matter in our universe, but that it’s invisible! So, how can we detect it?

Dark Matter 101: The LZ Crash Course 📷 | Lesson 3: Detecting dark matter
Hello again! It’s time for the third installment of our crash course! #DarkMatter101 #LZCrashCourse #DarkMatter #DetectingDarkMatter #ParticlePhysics #Astrophysics #ScienceSeries #SpaceMysteries #DirectDetection

Happy pride from LZ! We recognize and celebrate our LGBTQIA+ collaborators and are proud of the contributions they make to science 🏳️‍🌈
#pridemonth #happypride #lgbtqia

WIMPs are a hypothetical class of particles that LZ is searching for 🕵️

Tune in next time when we will be talking about how we can detect dark matter.

#DarkMatter101 #LZCrashCourse #DarkMatter #WIMPs #ParticlePhysics #Astrophysics #ScienceSeries #SpaceMysteries

One of the candidates that meets these requirements are WIMPs ✅

But we do know that dark matter should be:
🫥 Invisible - it doesn’t interact with light
🐴 Stable - it existed at the very start of the universe
🪐 Massive - we see its gravitational impact all over the universe
❄️ Cold - dark matter provided the building blocks for our universe

Today we are looking at what we know about dark matter and what that tells us about what it might be.

What do we know? Not much!

🌌 Dark Matter 101: The LZ Crash Course 🚀 | Lesson 2: What is dark matter?
Welcome back to our crash course! Each lesson we tackle a different aspect of the dark matter mystery.

💫 And the Bullet Cluster? It’s a cosmic smash-up where dark matter and normal matter clearly part ways.

This is just the beginning. Follow along as we dive deeper into the universe’s biggest missing piece #DarkMatter101 #LZCrashCourse #DarkMatter #ComaCluster #VeraRubin #BulletCluster #Astrophysics

🌐 The Cosmic Microwave Background shows early-universe patterns shaped by more than just visible stuff.

🔭 Vera Rubin found stars at the edges of galaxies weren’t slowing down, another hint of invisible mass.

💥 Zwicky noticed galaxies in the Coma Cluster moving way too fast, something unseen had to be holding them together.

🌌 Dark Matter 101: The LZ Crash Course 🚀 | Lesson 1: Evidence for dark matter.
Welcome to the first installment of our new series breaking down the mystery of dark matter, one post at a time. So, why do physicists think dark matter exists?

Don’t talk to me or my son ever again

(We love this new AR experience at the Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center!)