Deep beneath the planet’s surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, scientists are waiting for something that may never happen – the interaction of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. This is LUX-ZEPLIN, the most sensitive dark matter detector on Earth.
WIMPs are a leading contender for dark matter and could answer one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology: where is the missing matter that makes up the universe? The detector is filled with 10 tonnes of ultra-pure liquid xenon and is so sensitive that even a single gram of dust would skew its results. A single collision could reveal what most of the universe is made of, or prove that decades of physics may be pointing us in the wrong direction.
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