Driftspace
A particle detector buried nearly 1.5 kilometres underground in an old gold mine
A particle detector buried nearly 1.5 kilometres underground in an old gold mine has recorded an interaction that physicists say they cannot easily account for using known sources of background radiation. The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, which uses a tank of super-cooled liquid xenon and hundreds of light sensors to search for hypothetical particles thought to make up invisible dark matter, detected the event during a 220-day run. Researchers presented the result at an international astrophysics conference in Japan in early September, carefully noting that a single data point falls far short of the statistical bar for a scientific discovery, and that the work has not yet been peer-reviewed. Dark matter has never been directly observed but is widely considered to account for a large share of the total mass-energy content of the universe. Independent experiments around the world will now examine their own data for comparable signals. What is it about the deep unknowns of physics and the cosmos that captures your imagination?