Knut Morå: Recent dark matter search results from the LZ experiment

Tuesday Oct 6, 2026, 1:15 PM → 2:15 PM Europe/Stockholm

FB54 (AlbaNova Main Building)

LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is the world’s most sensitive direct detection experiment to weak-scale dark matter-matter interactions. Using a two-phase time projection chamber containing an active mass of seven tonnes of liquid xenon, the collaboration has published results for a 4.2 tonne-year exposure, achieving world-leading limits and a sensitivity to spin-independent WIMP-nucleon interactions for a 40 GeV/c² WIMP of 5.1^-48 cm². A follow-up search with the same data set, extending the search window up to 270 keV, has yielded one event consistent with a nuclear recoil of 240 +/- 23 (stat) +/- 23 (syst) keV, which is difficult to explain with any known background, and which corresponded to a 2.6 σ global significance across the search space.

I will describe the LZ data and analysis, with a particular emphasis on the effort to understand and model the high energy nuclear recoil region in light of this result.

About the speaker: Knut Morå received his PhD from Stockholm university with work on the statistical modelling of the XENON1T liquid xenon dark matter detector. As a postdoc at Columbia university, he was an analysis coordinator for the first science run results of XENONnT, coordinating the collaboration effort to understand and model the new detector. As a senior scientist at Universität Zürich, he is currently contributing to the LZ liquid xenon detector which provides the best sensitivity to spin-independent dark-matter as well as the XLZD future liquid xenon observatory. In addition, he has joined the low energy threshold effort with the TESSERACT experiment that aims to reach new sensitivity below the reach of liquid xenon detectors.

In the OKC: full Tuesday Oct 6th, in the ALPHA/XENON B5 corridor.