Minicolloquium | DM searches at U-M

LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a dark matter experiment under construction 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. With data taking expected to begin in a few months, this talk will report the current status of the LZ experiment, the contributions of U-M to LZ and the connection to other areas of particle physics.