Reducing radioactivityĪll materials on Earth, including those used in WIMP detector construction, emit some radiation that could potentially mask dark matter interactions. Two large arrays of light sensors collect these two flashes of light, and together they allow researchers to reconstruct the position, energy and type of interaction that took place. When they breach the surface, they are pulled into the space above the liquid, which is filled with xenon gas, and accelerated by another electric field to create a second flash of light. In LZ, two massive electrical grids apply an electric field across the volume of liquid, which pushes these released electrons to the liquid’s surface. The goal in hunting for dark matter is to build as sensitive a detector as possible, so it can see the dark matter, and to put it in as quiet a place as possible, so the dark matter signal can be seen over the background radioactivity. On Earth, however, we are constantly surrounded by low, nondangerous levels of radioactivity coming from trace elements – mainly uranium and thorium – in the environment, as well as cosmic rays from space. Over the past 30 years, scientists have developed an experimental program to try to detect the rare interactions between WIMPs and regular atoms. WIMPs in the Milky Way theoretically fly through us on Earth all the time, but because they interact weakly, they just don’t hit anything. “WIMP” captures the particle’s essence quite nicely – it has mass, meaning it interacts gravitationally, but it otherwise interacts very weakly – or rarely – with normal matter. One popular guess is that dark matter is a new type of particle, the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, or WIMP. I’m a physicist interested in understanding the nature of dark matter.
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