New Bristol Uni research reveals surprising result in search for dark matter
Dark matter was first proposed nearly a century ago and scientist have spent many decades trying to detect a signal using a range of technologies.
Global scientists have encountered an intriguing particle interaction in their search for dark matter, which might help pave the way for answering one of the biggest unresolved questions about our universe.
The study has potentially detected the very first hint of a dark matter interaction in what appears as the most compelling indication of this mysterious invisible substance to date.
Dark matter was first proposed nearly a century ago and scientist have spent many decades trying to detect a signal using a range of technologies.
It accounts for around 85% of the mass in the universe but has never been directly detected until – possibly – now.
The study recorded a single particle interaction, which researchers have struggled to explain with known background signals from normal matter.
The scientists behind the find said that although the isolated result does not yet meet the statistical threshold for an official discovery, it was an intriguing step forward.
The progress was possible due to an international collaboration of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions spanning six countries, including nine universities in the UK.
For two years they have been rigorously scrutinising data from one of the world’s most sensitive dark matter detectors, called LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), managed by the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The study, using data collected from LZ, found one particle interaction which could potentially have been caused by a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), a candidate for dark matter.
Study lead author Dr Sam Eriksen, from the University of Bristol, said: “Scientists have been trying to better understand dark matter, which makes up the vast majority of matter in the universe, for nearly a century.
“What we have observed in this analysis could be the first step in understanding dark matter as a particle.
“Following a huge amount of scientific effort, this is incredibly exciting.”
Dr Eriksen presented the findings in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan.
It has now been made available for wider scrutiny by the scientific community and has been submitted to a journal for publication.
Professor Rick Gaitskell, from Brown University, added: “We’re very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low.
“With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. 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.”
LZ searches for dark matter by looking for signature flashes of light from energy deposited in the detector.
The collaboration leverages multiple methods to prevent or account for particle interactions caused by normal matter.
This includes the mile of rock that shields the detector from cosmic rays from space, a water tank and outer detectors that protect the central detector from background neutrons, and a suite of computational tools that disentangle particle interactions and reject dark matter mimics.
The experiment, which is ongoing, used 10 tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon to search for dark matter and is optimised to look for WIMPs.
If the anomalous event was caused by dark matter, the WIMP that generated it would likely have a mass of at least 200 GeV/c2 (gigaelectronvolts), or more than 200 times the mass of a proton.
It would also suggest a specific type of interaction between WIMPs and ordinary matter beyond the simplest model.
The LZ results have not reached “5-sigma” significance, the statistical threshold considered a discovery in physics.
The new analysis is 2.6 sigma, meaning there is approximately a 0.5% chance that the event could be explained by known backgrounds.
With additional data, researchers can test whether the finding continues to grow in significance or fades away.