370 | Daniel Akerib on a Faint Hint of Dark Matter
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
One reason it's been so hard to directly detect the dark matter is that we're not sure what it is. But for a long time, a leading candidate has been "Weakly Interacting Massive Particles" (WIMPs), so an impressive amount of experimental effort has been put into trying to detect them. Recently, a single provocative event appeared in the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment. Daniel Akerib, a physicist at LZ, joins us to talk about dark matter and the recent data, which has low statistical significance but is intriguing nevertheless.
Blog post with show notes and transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/10/05/370-daniel-akerib-on-a-faint-hint-of-dark-matter/
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Daniel Akerib received a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Professor of Physics, by courtesy, in the physics department at Stanford University. He has been searching for dark matter since the early 1990s, first with the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and more recently with the LUX and LUX-ZEPLIN projects.
- SLAC web page Stanford web page Paper: "Search for dark matter particle interactions in an extended nuclear recoil energy window with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment" Wikipedia