SPEAKER: Daniel Kodroff (Penn State) – TITLE: Background Modeling and First Results From The LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Experiment

This is a VIRTUAL Event

TITLE: Background Modeling and First Results From The LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Experiment

ABSTRACT: LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a dark matter experiment located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, USA employing a 7 tonne active volume of liquid xenon in a dual-phase time projection chamber (TPC). It’s surrounded by an instrumented xenon “skin” region and gadolinium-loaded liquid scintillator outer detector, primarily serving as active vetoes for gamma-ray and neutron backgrounds, respectively, all contained within an ultra-pure water tank. A comprehensive material
assay and selection campaign for detector components, along with a xenon purification campaign, have further ensured an ultra-low background environment. These mitigations have allowed LZ to achieve a background rate of (63.0 ± 4.5) x 10−6 events/keVee/kg/day in the low energy region, approximately 60 times lower than that of its predecessor LUX experiment. In this low background region, LZ has recently set new world-leading limits for the spin-independent elastic scattering of nuclear recoils of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with masses above 9 GeV/c^2 using an exposure of 60 live days and a fiducial mass of 5.5 tonnes. This talk will provide an overview of the LZ detector and a description of its backgrounds with an emphasis on techniques to constrain these backgrounds in situ. I will also discuss the first results from LZ and briefly discuss its future science program.

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Meeting ID: 917 8226 8585