3:30–4:45 pm MCP 201
On September 1, the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment announced that it had seen an event consistent with a dark matter signal, in a region of parameter space where modeled backgrounds predict much less than one event in the lifetime of LZ. This event, LZ230616, appears to be a lone 248 keV nuclear recoil occurring deep inside LZ's 7-ton dual-phase xenon time projection chamber, operating 4850' underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, SD. Though this is a single event, the extremely low backgrounds in the relevant region of interest result in dark matter interpretations being favored over the background-only hypothesis with a global significance of 2.6 sigma. In this colloquium I will dissect the significance of LZ230616, discussing the details of the analysis, the context of this search relative to LZ's previous dark matter searches, the dominant modeled backgrounds for this search, and the potential for unmodeled or mismodeled backgrounds to create an event like LZ230616. I will also describe the road ahead, looking at what we hope to learn from additional LZ data, from the other xenon TPCs operating worldwide, and from other operating, planned, and imagined dark matter direct detection experiments.