Seminario CAPA. Alberto Usón, (Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)

"The Lux-Zeplin experiment and an intriguing new dark matter search result"

Alberto Usón
(Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics at the School of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Edinburgh)

The nature of dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in modern science. With plenty of different possible candidates and a wide mass range, Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs) usually rises as one of the most promising candidates. The direct detection experiment LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) primarily searches for WIMPs using 7 tonnes of active liquid xenon at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (South Dakota). With this technology, LZ has demonstrated world-leading sensitivity to a wide range of dark matter models. A new analysis from LZ searching for effective field theory and inelastic models of dark matter identifies a single nuclear recoil candidate at 248 keV, in tension with the background-only hypothesis at a global significance of 2.6σ. Whilst this is far from constituting a detection, the event is nevertheless intriguing. In this seminar, I will give an overview of the analysis, discuss the relevant high-energy backgrounds, and explore the wider implications of the event for dark matter searches. I will also introduce how the LZ detector works and highlight some of the other experiment’s most recent results, including the observation of solar neutrinos through Coherent Elastic neutrino-Nucleus Scattering and our latest search for more conventional WIMPs.

Jueves , 1 octubre, 12:00 horas, seminario de Física Atómica, Molecular y Nuclear