Tentative evidence for dark matter?! #shorts

From the creator

There's been a tentative possible dark matter detection from particle physicists at the Lux-Zeppelin experiment - a large tank of liquid xenon buried underground in South Dakota (NOTE: I incorrectly stated this as Arizona in the video). Because dark matter doesn’t interact with the electromagnetic force, essentially you can’t see it. It doesn’t interact with light, absorb, reflect, emit light in any way. What we look for instead are the really unlikely collisions between a normal matter particle, and a dark matter particle that just happens to come in and collide with it. Like if a cue ball on a pool table was invisible and you’re just looking for the movement of the colourful balls to know that the cue ball was there. So you’re looking for behaviour in the normal matter that you can’t explain. This is why they bury these things deep underground so that they can shield their xenon, their normal matter, from things like cosmic rays that come in and bounce around the normal matter and just add a load of noise. And we can model for the rest of the expected interactions that create noise in your xenon that aren’t dark matter interactions, and we call all those backgrounds. But in June 2023, the LZ team recorded an event that falls outside of what you’d expect for the background noise in the xenon. It’s this black dot here in this figure which falls below the red lines there, and that’s the important point here. That means it’s not far enough away from expected backgrounds

Published 2026-09-28 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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