This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: For the better part of a century, people have been trying to understand dark matter. This invisible substance makes up roughly 85% of the mass in the universe but has never been directly detected.
Determining exactly what it is remains one of the biggest questions about our world. Now, a new analysis from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment has recorded a single particle interaction that researchers have great difficulty explaining with known background signals from normal matter. The result does not yet meet the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery but is the most compelling hint of dark matter reported by the experiment to date.
LZ is an international collaboration of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions. The detector is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and operates nearly 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) below ground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota.
The experiment uses 10 tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon to search for dark matter and is optimized to look for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. The results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan. The paper will be released as a preprint on the online repository arXiv and submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.
"We're very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low," said Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University and the spokesperson for LZ. "With only one event, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter.
But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input." The LZ collaboration studies experimental data in batches. In the new result, researchers analyzed 220 live days of data collected between March 2023 and April 2024. The collaboration had previously searched this dataset for faint signals from the simplest kinds of WIMP interactions.
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