ALBANY, N.Y. (Sept. 1, 2026) — UAlbany physicists played a central role in analyzing a so-far unexplained anomaly in the data from the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector that offers the most compelling hint yet in the hunt for an unseen building block of the universe.
The new analysis from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment deep inside a former South Dakota gold mine includes a single particle interaction that the researchers so far have been unable to explain with known background signals from normal matter.
The result does not yet meet the statistical threshold required to claim that LZ has discovered direct evidence of dark matter, which would reshape our understanding of physics and how the universe works. But it is a tantalizing clue that they may be looking in the right place.
Read the full announcement from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
The missing 85 percent
For the better part of a century, people have been trying to understand dark matter — the invisible substance that almost never interacts with normal matter but is believed to make up roughly 85 percent of the mass in the universe. It has never been directly detected, but physicists believe it must exist based on their observation of the gravitational forces that move galaxies. Determining exactly what dark matter is and how it behaves would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.
“These latest results from LZ are truly exciting, but we also have to be careful not to get ahead of ourselves,” said Associate Professor of Physics Cecilia Levy, one of several UAlbany researchers working on the LZ project. “The LZ collaboration has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to find a mundane explanation for what we saw in the data. At the end of the day, for now, it’s just one event. But we already have so much more data to look at, which should be able to tell us whether what we’re seeing is just a statistical fluctuation or the first hint of something never before seen by humans.”
LZ is an international collaboration of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions. The detector is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and operates nearly one mile below ground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota. The experiment uses 10 tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon to search for dark matter and is optimized to look for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles.