Ian Sample

speaker

1,976 appearances 28 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 2d ago

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

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

So I called up Dr. Samuel Erickson. voice-verified

He's a senior research associate at the University of Bristol. voice-verified

And he's also the first author of the research paper that the LZ detector experiment put out discussing this new finding. voice-verified

nonetheless. voice-verified

So Sam says this is really exciting. voice-verified

So I wanted to know what it felt like when they saw in their data what might be this interesting potential first glimpse of dark matter. voice-verified

I mean, let's be clear that nobody on the experiment is claiming to have found dark matter. voice-verified

What they're saying is we've looked at everything else we think it could be and we can't explain it. voice-verified

So we're going to put it out there. voice-verified

We're going to let people discuss it. voice-verified

And that's all we're doing. voice-verified

The good thing about particle physicists is that they have... voice-verified

pretty strict sort of thresholds, statistical thresholds that you have to meet before you can claim a discovery. voice-verified

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