First Dark Matter Search Results from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment.

By J. Aalbers, D. Akerib, C. Akerlof, A. Musalhi, F. Alder, A. Alqahtani, S. Alsum, C. Amarasinghe, A. Ames, T. Anderson and 332 more. Physical Review Letters, 2022

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The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment is a dark matter detector centered on a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber operating at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, USA. This Letter reports results from LUX-ZEPLIN's first search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) with an exposure of 60 live days using a fiducial mass of 5.5 t. A profile-likelihood ratio analysis shows the data to be consistent with a background-only hypothesis, setting new limits on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon, spin-dependent WIMP-neutron, and spin-dependent WIMP-proton cross sections for WIMP masses above 9  GeV/c^{2}. The most stringent limit is set for spin-independent scattering at 36  GeV/c^{2}, rejecting cross sections above 9.2×10^{-48}  cm at the 90% confidence level.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/19627ed53dd6facc546b711797a332f5326d25c6