- Sept. 12, 2022, 2:00 pm US/Central
- Hornets Nest - WH 8X
- Kelly Stifter, Fermilab
- Host: Dylan Temples, dtemples@fnal.gov
Abstract: The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment is a dark matter detector centered on a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber operating at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, USA. Results from LZ’s first search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) showed the data to be consistent with a background-only hypothesis, setting new limits on spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross-sections for WIMP masses above 9 GeV/c^2. A significant challenge in this analysis was the presence of “accidental coincidence” backgrounds, which arise from the pile-up of light-only and charge-only events. In this talk, I will briefly review the first LZ results, give a detailed look at the methods used to remove and predict accidental backgrounds, and comment on the potential impact of these backgrounds in a next-generation experiment.