LZ Dark Matter

And a special thank you to our collaborators who are working over the holidays!

Here’s to a great year of science ahead!

Happy holidays from deep underground! 🎄✨
LZ wishes everyone a joyful holiday season and a happy New Year. We’re incredibly grateful to the scientists, engineers, and crew whose hard work and commitment keep the experiment going every day.

This result highlights the versatility of liquid xenon technology, opening new opportunities for future neutrino and rare-event studies, while LZ continues its core mission of dark matter discovery.

📄 Check out our paper preprint here: lz.lbl.gov

😶‍🌫️ We’ve taken our first steps into the neutrino fog! LZ has just set world leading limits on low mass dark matter AND has observed neutrinos from the sun’s core. ☀️

LZ Sets a World’s Best in the Hunt for Galactic Dark Matter and Gets a New Look at Neutrinos from the Sun’s Core The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment analyzed the largest dataset ever collected by a dark matter detector, reaching unmatched sensitivity.

Today, researchers with the @lzdarkmatter.bsky.social experiment set a world's best in the search for galactic #DarkMatter, and also marked the detector’s first glimpse of neutrinos from the sun's core. newscenter.lbl.gov/2025/12/08/l...

The experiment will also release a paper preprint at the end of the webinar, posted at lz.lbl.gov, and then uploaded to arXiv.

Please contact the LZ Spokesperson (Richard Gaitskell, Brown University) and LBL Press Office (Lauren Biron) for further details.

Exciting update – tune in from 10am MT on the 8th of December to hear new results from the LZ Dark Matter Experiment – broadcast from a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility!

🌟Join our results webinar live at this link: sanfordlab.org/lz-2025-result 🌟

⭐ A huge thank you to everyone who stopped by, asked questions and shared the excitement of exploring one of the universe’s biggest mysteries. Our curiosity keeps the search moving forward!

🔹The LBNL group took part in Spooky Astronomy at the Chabot Observatory and HALLoween at Lawrence Hall of Science. 🎃 They got the public involved in dark matter activities and even had a cloud chamber! ☁️

🔹Researchers from @ox.ac.uk gave flash talks, alongside dark matter demonstrations and activities. 📸

🔹The dark matter group at Penn State hosted an information booth featuring a virtual underground tour.⛏️ @pennstateuniv.bsky.social

🔹At the SURF Visitor Centre the public took part in a variety of activities, including playing custom LZ video games developed by researchers based at SURF. 🕹️ @sanfordlabs.bsky.social

Last month LZers from all over the world took part in dark matter day events where they got the public involved with the hunt for dark matter! 🌎
#darkmatter #darkmatterday

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

By combining these signals, we can reconstruct exactly where the interaction happened in 3D. 🗺️ This allows us to focus on the detector’s clean inner region and reject pesky background events near the edges.

When a particle interacts inside the detector, it creates a quick flash of light (S1) and a second, delayed flash (S2) as freed electrons drift upward. ⚡✨

🌌 Dark Matter 101: The LZ Crash Course 🚀 | Lesson 4: The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) detector, part 2!

Last time, we introduced the LZ detector and its role in the hunt for dark matter. Now, let’s dig into how we actually read out signals when a particle interacts inside our detector ⚡️💡

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!