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Milestone for US dark-matter detector

17 March 2017

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has formally approved a key construction milestone for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, propelling the project towards its April 2020 goal for completion. On 9 February the project passed a DOE review and approval stage known as “Critical Decision 3”, which accepts the final design and formally launches construction. The LZ detector, which will be built roughly 1.5 km underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota and be filled with 10 tonnes of liquid xenon to detect dark-matter interactions, is considered one of the best bets to determine whether dark-matter candidates known as WIMPs exist.

The project stems from the merger of two previous experiments: LUX (Large Underground Xenon) and ZEPLIN (ZonEd Proportional scintillation in LIquid Noble gases). It was first approved in 2014 and currently has about 250 participating scientists in 37 institutions in the US, UK, Portugal, Russia and Korea. The detector is expected to be at least 50 times more sensitive to finding signals from dark-matter particles than its predecessor LUX, and will compete with other liquid-xenon experiments under development worldwide in the race to detect dark matter. A planned upgrade to the current XENON1T experiment (called XENONnT) at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy and China’s plans to advance the PandaX-II detector, for instance, are both expected to have a similar schedule and scale to LZ.

The LZ collaboration plans to release a Technical Design Report later this year. “We will try to go as fast as we can to have everything completed by April 2020,” says LZ project director Murdock Gilchriese. “We got a very strong endorsement to go fast and to be first.”

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