Sub-GeV Dark Matter Searches and Electric Field Studies for the LUX and LZ Experiments

Understand

The nature of dark matter (DM) remains a mystery since it has so far eluded detection in the laboratory.

• To that end, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment was built to directly observe the interaction of DM with xenon target nuclei.
• LUX acquired data from April 2013 to May 2016 at SURF in South Dakota, which led to publications of many world-leading exclusion limits that probe much of the unexplored DM parameter space.
• This manuscript describes two novel direct detection methods that used the first LUX dataset to place limits on sub-GeV DM.