Ian Sample

speaker

1,976 appearances 28 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard yesterday

Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 28 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.

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Science Weekly · ‘One of the biggest discoveries in science’: have scientists found dark matter? · 10 Sep 2026 podcast

Radioactive decays, particles coming in from the solar wind, from space. voice-verified

All sorts of particles constantly crashing into each other, producing... voice-verified

not only background noise, but sometimes also signals that can be mistaken for signals for dark matter. voice-verified

So it's an incredibly hard thing to find. voice-verified

This result is from what's called the Lux Zeppelin detector, the LZ detector, and it's one of the world's most sensitive dark matter detectors at the moment. voice-verified

It's built in an old gold mine in South Dakota. voice-verified

It's nearly a mile underground, and that's to shield it from a lot of the particle interactions, a lot of the noise that we were talking about earlier. voice-verified

And at the heart of the detector is 10 tons of ultra-pure liquid xenon. voice-verified

Xenon's a noble gas. voice-verified

You can make it, liquefy it, and it becomes an incredibly dense liquid that you can use as a detector. voice-verified

Now, the aim of the detector is that a dark matter particle might get far enough to this detector, into this fluid, and strike a xenon atom, actually interact with it, and produce a flash of light. voice-verified

Now, there are photosensors all the way around this tank which will detect that light. voice-verified

And by analysing the light, you can try and infer some stuff about the particle, what happened in that interaction. voice-verified

It could tell you something about, for example, the mass of the particle involved in hitting the xenon atom. voice-verified

What the researchers reported was a single event that might, and I have to repeat, it might, have been triggered by... voice-verified

a postulated dark matter particle called a weakly interacting massive particle, the beautiful acronym of a WIMP. voice-verified

If they're right, this particle would actually be a pretty heavy version of a WIMP. voice-verified

It would be about 200 times the mass of a proton, proton being the sort of positive subatomic particle inside an atomic nucleus. voice-verified

say they have only one event, but they are reasonably excited about it. voice-verified

And I wanted to find out more about this. voice-verified

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