One reason it's been so hard to directly detect the dark matter is that we're not sure what it is. But for a long time, a leading candidate has been "Weakly Interacting Massive Particles" (WIMPs), so an impressive amount of experimental effort has been put into trying to detect them. Recently, a single provocative event appeared in the <a href= "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_experiment">LUX-ZEPLIN</a> (LZ) dark matter experiment. Daniel Akerib, a physicist at LZ, joins us to talk about dark matter and the recent data, which has low statistical significance but is intriguing nevertheless. Blog post with show notes and transcript: <a href= "https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/10/05/370-daniel-akerib-on-a-faint-hint-of-dark-matter/"> https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/10/05/370-daniel-akerib-on-a-faint-hint-of-dark-matter/</a> Support Mindscape on <a href= "https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll" target="_blank" rel= "noopener">Patreon</a>. Daniel Akerib received a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Professor of Physics, by courtesy, in the physics department at Stanford University. He has been searching for dark matter since the early 1990s, first with the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and more recently with the LUX and <a href= "https://lz.lbl.gov/">LUX-ZEPLIN</a> projects. <ul> <li><a href= "https://faculty.slac.stanford.edu/person/daniel-akerib">SLAC web page</a></li> <li><a href= "https://physics.stanford.edu/people/daniel-akerib">Stanford web page</a></li> <li>Paper: "<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02823">Search for dark matter particle interactions in an extended nuclear recoil energy window with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment</a>"</li> <li><a href= "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Akerib">Wikipedia</a></li> </ul>

Podurama

Home

Trending

Personal

Your Podcasts

New Episodes

My Files

Favourite Episodes

Tags (Folders)

Recently Played

Bookmarks

Followed Playlists

370 | Daniel Akerib on a Faint Hint of Dark Matter

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

AI Chapters

AI Insights

Reviews