Colloquium – Bjoern Penning – Present and future Direct DM Searches

Speaker: Bjoern Penning (University of Michigan)

Title: Present and future Direct DM Searches

Abstract:

We are discussing the prospects of ongoing and future dark matter search experiments. LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a dark matter experiment at the 4850’ level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. The experiment utilizes a two-phase time projection chamber (TPC), containing seven active tonnes of liquefied xenon, to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Auxiliary veto detectors, including a liquid scintillator outer detector, improve rejection of unwanted background events in the central region of the detector. LZ has been designed to explore much of the parameter space available for WIMP models, with excellent sensitivity for WIMP masses between a few GeV and a few TeV. In this talk we will report the current status of the LZ experiment, and recent results. We will also explore the prospects of two future experiments: Tesseract, a sub-GeV cryogenic dark matter search, and XLZD, a 3rd Generation experiment able to reach the neutrino floor, the ultimate frontier of standard DM searches.

Host: Ryan Wang