Did scientists just find a dark matter particle? Maybe
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What is the new flash event detected by the LZ dark‑matter detector?
Hey, this is Flora and you're listening to Science Friday. We're talking about a flashy new find in the hunt for dark matter. That's the stuff that makes up 85% of all matter in the universe, but we have no clue what it is. A mile under Leeds, South Dakota, you'll find a giant cauldron filled with seven tons of liquid xenon encased in water and surrounded by super sensitive photo detectors. Known as the LZ detector, its job is to look for flashes of light that come from particles bumping into xenon atoms. And over the course of seven months or so, the researchers say they saw one very weird flash, a bump that doesn't look like it could have come from any particle we know of. So as you might imagine, physicists are cautiously pumped about this finding, especially my next guest, Dr. Richard Gatesgall, a physicist at Brown University and the spokesperson for the Lux Zeppelin dark matter experiment.
Richard, welcome to Science Friday.
Thank you. You're very kind.
Is cautiously pumped how you describe the mood?
There are so many ways of expressing emotion in scientific experiments. Obviously, we always try to keep that a little bit aside. We have designed a very sort of rigorous statistical rather dry process for looking at these events that we're collecting deep underground at the
lab in South Dakota.
Tell us how you're feeling. Come on.
Well, after 40 years of being very repressed, I'm afraid that
you
probably barely noticed when I let my
hair
down.
How do scientists describe their excitement and caution after seeing the weird flash?
But, you know, there were a team of, you know, 250 scientists who run our experiments deep underground looking for dark matter events. And a new analysis that we have just released a paper for does, as you describe, have a fascinating single event that looks consistent with dark matter particle.
I read this is not the interaction you were initially looking for.
We're looking for dark matter that is most of the matter in our galaxy. These particles, if the hypothesis is correct, these particles and hundreds of millions of them are passing through you every second.
Right now. They're in the room with
us. Right now. They're in the room. They're moving pretty fast. And we're trying to look for the very occasional interaction of one of these dark matter particles with our detector. Usually, we look at very low energies. But we decided that we were going to expand the energy range over which we would look for dark matter interactions. So we've decided to go to the sort of next level up of possible interactions. And this new result, we actually found an event that looks very consistent with what we expect with such sort of next to leading order, if you like, or slightly more complicated interactions.
If dark matter particles are all around us and coming for us every second, why are there so few interactions?
So dark matter, we actually give dark matter another label for these particle searches.
Why are dark‑matter particles called ‘weakly interacting massive particles’ (WIMPs)?
We call them weakly interacting massive particles. And that term weakly interacting is no small exaggeration. These particles are so weakly interacting that if we took a single particle and and set it off on a journey through a stack of lead, just continuously passing through lead, it could actually travel all the way from here to our closest star, well, after the sun, Proxima Centauri, which is over four light years. And four light years of lead, the particles still wouldn't, on a 50-50 basis, have interacted. This is crazy small probabilities of interacting. And the only reason it is even remotely feasible for us to say we're going to try and measure such weakly interacting particles with an experiment here on Earth, or if you like, under the Earth, is that we have a very large detector.
It's nearly 10 tons in scale, and that we watch it for a very long period of time. We're actually watching it for years, looking for occasional interactions. So it's that combination that there are 100 million, you know, huge flux of these particles traveling through us every second. So that combination means that even with this very, very predicted or hypothesis of a very weak interaction, that it may be possible for us to see an occasional event.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the new flash event detected by the LZ dark‑matter detector?
0:02–1:39
2
How do scientists describe their excitement and caution after seeing the weird flash?
1:39–3:16
3
Why are dark‑matter particles called ‘weakly interacting massive particles’ (WIMPs)?
3:16–5:47
4
How can we mentally picture an invisible, weakly interacting massive particle?
5:47–7:32
5
What does a single candidate event mean for the search for dark matter?
7:32–9:12
6
How are theorists reacting to the possible dark‑matter signal?
9:12–10:37
7
What would confirming multiple events imply for future dark‑matter experiments?
10:37–11:31
8
What are the next steps and broader implications if the signal is verified?
11:31–12:38
Speakers
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