SPEAKER: Chamindu (Chami) Amarasinghe – U. of Michigan – TITLE: Expansive Dark Matter Searches with LZ

ABSTRACT: LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is an underground direct detection experiment that conducted its first search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) and set world-leading upper limits on spin-independent and spin-dependent WIMP-nucleon couplings. In this talk I describe this result, and discuss how the WIMP search can be extended by considering all possible WIMP-nucleon interactions at the energy scale of direct detection using an effective field theory (EFT) approach. I also describe how tools from machine learning are applied in the EFT search, and how unsupervised learning can be used to detect anomalies of various sources in data. Finally, I will briefly discuss an experimental concept to measure electron and photon yields of nuclear recoils in liquid xenon at extremely low energies (below 0.3 keVNR), in order to improve the sensitivity of experiments like LZ to low mass WIMPs.

ZOOM Information –