New Milestones In Search For Dark Matter – With Significant Assistance from Scientists in Rochester

(Photo credit: Matthew Kapust / Sanford Underground Research Facility)
We still do not know, but we do not know with a much better precision than before.
We do not know what Dark Matter is composed of. The LZ detector was built under the tentative assumption that Dark Matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, aptly named WIMP’s. These particles, if they interact at all, will create tiny flashes of light in liquid xenon. The photomultipliers (PMT) will see the light, and the electronics will detect and process the PMT signals. We built that electronics at SkuTek Instrumentation together with University of Rochester. The electronics was deployed a few years ago at Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, SD. It has been running 24/7 without a single failure. The results of the first 280 days of running time equivalent have been published. No WIMPS yet, but we still have 3x more planned running time.

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