Paper

Searches for Light Dark Matter and Evidence of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering of Solar Neutrinos with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment

Eriksen, S R, Mitra, B, Lopes, M I, Hall, T, Penning, B, Fieldhouse, N, Nguyen, A, Gaemers, P W, Amarasinghe, C S, Khazov, A, Hunt, D, Haiston, J J, Alder, F, Morå, K, O'Brien, C L, David, A, Trask, M, Chin, Y T, W Ma, Arthurs, M, Brew, C A J, Carter, M, Sehr, G, Vaitkus, A C, A B M R Sazzad, Barillier, E E, Morrison, E, Manalaysay, A, Riyat, H S, Parveen, N, Kannichankandy, M K, Wang, A, Dunbar, C L, Palladino, K J, M G D van der Grinten, Fayer, S, Cottle, A, Bishop, E, Beattie, K, Zhang, T, Wang, Y, Leonard, D S, Contreras, S, Oyulmaz, K Y, Darlington, I, Y Xu, Wolf, L, Hall, C R, Angelides, N, Horn, M, Williams, M, Lorenzon, W, Gokhale, S, Orpwood, J, Weeldreyer, L, Zhang, H, Trengove, K, Siniscalco, J, Fearon, N M, Yeh, M, Dave, S, Lindote, A, Sumner, T J, Armstrong, J E, J Xu, Rhyne, C A, Mount, B J, Curran, D, Sargeant, I, Winnicki, J, Sinev, G, Santone, D, Wild, K, Matheson, R J, Silva, C, Almquist, B J, Baker, A, Murphy, A St J, C Lu, Mizrachi, E, Lesko, K T, Wright, C J, Gaitskell, R J, Genovesi, J, Fiorucci, S, Coronel, R, Bargemann, J W, Zha, W, Cox, G, Chott, N I, Chawla, A, McLaughlin, J, Pershing, T, Hampp, R H, Levy, C, Oliver-Mallory, K C, Ritchey, E, Tiedt, D

2025

Overview

We present searches for light dark matter (DM) with masses 3-9 GeV/\\(c^2\\) in the presence of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE\\(\\nu\\)NS) from \\(^{8}\\)B solar neutrinos with the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment. This analysis uses a 5.7 tonne-year exposure with data collected between March 2023 and April 2025. In an energy range spanning 1-6 keV, we report no significant excess of events attributable to dark matter nuclear recoils, but we observe a significant signal from \\(^{8}\\)B CE\\(\\nu\\)NS interactions that is consistent with expectation. We set world-leading limits on spin-independent and spin-dependent-neutron DM-nucleon interactions for masses down to 5 GeV/\\(c^2\\). In the no-dark-matter scenario, we observe a signal consistent with \\(^{8}\\)B CE\\(\\nu\\)NS events, corresponding to a \\(4.5\\sigma\\) statistical significance. This is the most significant evidence of \\(^{8}\\)B CE\\(\\nu\\)NS interactions and is enabled by robust background modeling and mitigation techniques. This demonstrates LZ's ability to detect rare signals at keV-scale energies.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Dark matter / Elastic scattering / Searching / Solar neutrinos