糖心TV

The discovery of the nature of Dark Matter, accounting for 85% of the mass in the Universe, remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science, recognised as amongst the highest priorities internationally. Three techniques are being deployed in the hunt - direct searches seeking Dark Matter particle scattering in terrestrial detectors; indirect searches in space seeking annihilation products; and production of entirely new Dark Matter at high energy particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider. Direct searches with ultra low-background rare event searches in deep underground laboratories provides at present the only feasible path to unambiguous identification of galactic Dark Matter. The construction of the LZ Dark Matter Search Experiment is nearing completion at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, USA, in preparation for first science data from April 2020. LZ will be the most sensitive detector ever deployed in the hunt for Dark Matter, with unprecedented sensitivity to the favoured Dark Matter candidate class of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) as well as several other well-motivated candidates and rare neutrino physics processes, largely inaccessible to-date, that arise in extensions to the Standard Model. This talk will give an overview of the status of direct Dark Matter searches, including the LZ Dark Matter Experiment and what we might expect from emerging technologies in the coming years as we attempt to close in on Dark Matter.