Scientists have just narrowed down the possible hiding places for dark matter particles.
The LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ, experiment has searched for and ruled out the existence of dark matter particles with a wide range of properties, researchers report Aug. 26 at two conferences. Dark matter is a substance whose influence can be seen on the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters, but which has never been directly detected.
LZ searches for a hypothetical type of dark matter particle called a weakly interacting massive particle, specifically WIMPs with masses over 9 billion electron volts. (For comparison, a proton has a mass of about 1 billion electron volts.) The LZ detector, filled with 10 metric tons of liquid xenon, monitors for the recoil of atomic nuclei when WIMPs enter the liquid (SN: 7/7/22).
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