Speaker
Description
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment employs a 7-tonne liquid xenon time projection chamber operating 4850 feet underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, USA. LZ has achieved world-leading sensitivity to WIMP dark matter above 5 GeV/c² and reported the first >3σ evidence of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering from ⁸B solar neutrinos. The natural 8.9% abundance of ¹³⁶Xe further gives LZ sensitivity to neutrinoless double beta decay at a level competitive with current dedicated experiments. These searches span a wide range of energies and rely on careful control of backgrounds throughout. In this talk I will present LZ’s latest results. I will discuss how LZ’s subsystems were designed from the outset to minimise backgrounds, and were supported by rigorous radioassay and activity-reduction campaigns during construction. I will also review the dedicated sideband and simulation studies that are used to further constrain both radiogenic and instrumental backgrounds in searches for rare interactions.