It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. September’s list includes a tantalizing hint of the elusive dark matter at the LUX-ZEPLIN detector; entangled Z bosons at the Large Hadron Collider; possible use of psychoactive substances in the Late Pleistocene; and an intriguing technical description of a telescope attributed to Galileo.
Physicists believe dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of matter in our universe, with the strongest (but not only) candidate being so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). But directly detecting WIMPs, or other alternative hypothetical dark matter particles, has eluded physicists for decades. We might have our first glimpse, however, courtesy of the LUX-ZEPLIN detector buried deep in a gold mine in South Dakota.
Those potentially exciting results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan, with a preprint available on the arXiv. (It has been submitted to Physical Review Letters for peer review.) The announcement came with strong caveats: the signal is just a hint, well below the threshold needed to confirm discovery, and might just be a statistical fluke. Anyone who regularly follows dark matter news knows that past tantalizing anomalies evaporated as more data came in. But the LUX-ZEPLIN team was unable to account for this event and decided to report their result to the broader physics community.
They are still collecting data, as is the XENONnT at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. And China’s PandaX detector is currently being built. If it turns out to be a WIMP that struck a xenon nucleus, it’s not what physicists would predict.
The event had a higher nuclear recoil energy than expected, which means the detector should have also picked up several lower-energy WIMPs; it did not. That has theoreticians scrambling to come up with alternative models. Perhaps the interaction rate increases with collision energy.
Or perhaps WIMPs have an internal structure, like an atom, and only interact if hit hard enough. Or its coupling to ordinary matter could depend on its momentum.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
