Searching for dark matter in tanks buried 1km deep

While the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is trying to capture images of dark matter in space, a group of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California seeks this invisible form of matter underground. To do this, they buried tanks filled with xenon to a depth of one kilometer at an underground facility in South Dakota, also in the USA.

searched from LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), each cylinder is a state-of-the-art dark matter detector placed at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the small town of Lead. According to an article published last month in the journal Physical Review Lettersthere are currently two massive underground LZ detectors looking for evidence of particles of this material that could interact with “normal” matter.

Understanding dark matter

Dark matter, which is responsible for 85% of all the material that makes up the universe, remains a mystery to astrophysicists.

While dark matter is responsible for most of the universe’s gravitational force that keeps galaxies, including our Milky Way, spinning, it does not emit light or any other electromagnetic radiation. this means it is completely invisible to conventional detection.

Lacking a plausible explanation, scientists coined a hypothetical term: Weakly Interacting Large Particle or WIMP English initials to describe components of dark matter. The description is perfect because they always fly above us on Earth, but with such a weak level of interaction they don’t hit anything.

WIMPS Underground Hunt

Scientific models suggest that “WiMPs and their antiparticles left thermal equilibrium shortly after the big bang and stopped being produced spontaneously.” The article published by the LZ team reports the results of the first detector search by WIMPSs with an exposure of 60 days.

LZ tanks are continuously monitored by two series of photomultiplier tubes, Recording the characteristic double flash of light from the atoms of WIMPs.

Although the LZ records about five events per day in the detector, it’s too little to say there’s some sort of interference caused by dark matter. On the contrary, LZ aptly proved what dark matter is not. Once the detectors are up and running, it’s time to start large-scale observations until at any given moment a WIMP collides with a xenon atom.

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