Pacific Money | Society | East Asia

East Asia’s Quiet Race to Find the Universe’s Missing Mass

China, South Korea, and Japan all run their own programs to detect dark matter, some of them world-leading in sensitivity.

Scientists at work at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory in Sichuan Province.

On September 1, 2026, physicists with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, a ten-ton liquid xenon detector buried nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, announced they had recorded a single particle interaction that standard background processes struggle to explain. The event, drawn from 220 days of data collected between March 2023 and April 2024, sits at a statistical significance of about 2.6 sigma, far short of the 5-sigma threshold physicists require to claim a discovery, but it’s the strongest hint LZ has produced to date that a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) may have grazed its xenon target. It’s potentially a step forward in LZ’s main goal: to detect dark matter.

LZ’s spokesperson, Professor Rick Gaitskell of Brown University, was careful to frame it as intriguing rather than conclusive. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves,” he said. “We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.” His collaborators similarly stressed that unexpected backgrounds have fooled sensitive detectors before.

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On September 1, 2026, physicists with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, a ten-ton liquid xenon detector buried nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, announced they had recorded a single particle interaction that standard background processes struggle to explain. The event, drawn from 220 days of data collected between March 2023 and April 2024, sits at a statistical significance of about 2.6 sigma, far short of the 5-sigma threshold physicists require to claim a........

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