Speaker
Description
The mystery of dark matter is one of the greatest puzzles in modern science. What is 85% of the matter, or 25% of the mass/energy, of the universe made up of? No human knows for certain. Despite mountains of evidence from astrophysics and cosmology, direct laboratory detection eludes physicists. A leading candidate to explain dark matter is the WIMP or Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, a thermal relic left over after the Big Bang. I will be presenting the first search results from the LZ experiment, as well as some subsequent analyses in different channels, such as low-energy electron recoils, high-energy nuclear recoils (EFT), and multiple scattering. LZ, deployed in South Dakota, is one of the flagship US DOE dark matter projects, and currently world leading from 10 GeV up to the TeV scale in mass-energy in terms of setting limits on the WIMP interaction strength following non-discovery. I will also showcase the unprecedented degree of agreement between LZ data and simulation software (NEST +FlameNEST, LZLAMA, Geant4, and BACCARAT) utilized to model signal and background interactions in a detector like LZ.
