Scientists have just slashed the potential hiding spaces for dark matter particles.
The LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ, experiment has searched for and ruled out the existence of dark matter particles with a wide swath of properties, researchers report August 26 at two conferences. Dark matter is a substance whose influence can be seen on the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters, but which has never been directly detected.
LZ searches for a hypothetical type of dark matter particle called a weakly interacting massive particle, specifically WIMPs with masses above 9 billion electron volts. (For comparison, a proton has a mass of around 1 billion electron volts). The LZ detector, filled with 10 metric tons of liquid xenon, monitors for atomic nuclei recoiling when WIMPs plow into the liquid (SN: 7/7/22).