Co-Founded by UC Santa Barbara Physics Professor, LUX - ZEPLINSees Surprising Result in Search for Dark Matter

The LUX-ZEPLIN main detector in a surface lab before installation underground. | Credit: Matthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Facility This article was originally published in UCSB’s ‘The Current‘. or the better part of a century, people have been trying to understand dark matter. This invisible substance makes up roughly 85% of the mass in the universe but has never been directly detected. Determining exactly what it is remains one of the biggest open questions in science. Now, a new analysis from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment has recorded a single particle interaction, known as LZ.230616 for the date it occurred, that researchers have great difficulty explaining with known background…