7 ms·

I read their preprint[1] and they did a thorough job. They investigated a number of the things I'd suspect if I were looking for mis-reconstructed events or wei

I read their preprint[1] and they did a thorough job. They investigated a number of the things I'd suspect if I were looking for mis-reconstructed events or weird backgrounds. So it's certainly interesting! That said, particle physics history is full of 3 sigma particle "discoveries" that disappeared with more data. They're collecting more, so hopefully we'll learn more in a few more years. [1] https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/LZ_Preprint_260901_Dark_Matter_EFT_Nuclear_Recoil_Search_at_Higher_Energies.pdf https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/LZ_Pre...

smueller1234 15d ago
Or this[2] 2007 Science paper on ultra high energy cosmic ray source candidates ("anisotropy") that we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved. It was a fascinating experience as a junior member to follow the collaboration internal conversation and investigation on this, because a lot of extremely principled scientists were clearly deeply worried about losing their hard earned reputation. In the end, I am convinced that we were simply unlucky. [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.2843 https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.2843
- alexpotato 15d ago
  > we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved. It's stories like this that raise my p(we are in a simulation).
- WarmWash 15d ago
  Reminds me of the FTL neutrinos too, where the scientist where pretty much "hey, something is wrong, can you help us figure it out?" and the general public were the ones screaming "OMG! Physics is dead!" Then when it comes out as measurement error, the public is all "Damn these scientists are all hype machine clowns..."
  - dd8601fn 15d ago
    I’m fine with that. Put it at the feet of pop science blogging. I’m less fine with the time and resources spent on mouse models. They already know you’d get the same utility from a magic 8 ball, but they do it anyway.
    - gus_massa 15d ago
      Mouse models are useful to discard very bad ideas. There was a recent experiment to use bacteria to kill cancer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306894 They tried like 40 bacterias in vitro, then like 9 in mice, and only 1 was useful in mice and they will continue only with that, perhaps in humans. Anyway, as you suggest, there is a high chance it will fail. Also, you can do nasty stuff to mice that would never be allowed with humans. In that experiment they injected cancer cells in mice with a bad inmune system, so they could get like 90 mice with cancer and run the experiment in a short time. No ethical committee would approve that in humans.
    - IAmBroom 14d ago
      Your claim seems to be that testing medicines in animals is useless, because "everyone knows it's not going to work". Congratulations. You've just reduced all of medical science to the Tuskegee STD experiment.
  - pfdietz 15d ago
    That was a fiendish thing to debug; if I recall correctly it was a slightly and intermittently defective connector.
  - dguest 14d ago
    Unfortunately it wasn't just the public: it caused so much uproar within the experiment that two of the highest ranking members resigned their posts [1]. I was a bit dismayed at the reaction within the physics community. Experiments absolutely do need to follow procedures like blinding and careful internal review (especially before the data unblinding), but you can only spend so long designing the analysis before you unblind, and there are opportunity costs to cross checking everything. In an optimized community experiments will inevitably make mistakes. And once you unblind, it does no one any good to sit on an anomalous result forever. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10371 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10371
- logdahl 15d ago
  Wow haha, that is a lot of authors! Never seen this before!
  - thiagotomei 14d ago
    The ATLAS-CMS joint Higgs boson mass measurement paper has close to 6000 authors: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803 I think the final COVID consortium report has something like 30k authors.
  - kens 14d ago
    Most horrifying is a 2014 Science paper on Ebola with 58 authors, 5 of whom died of Ebola before publication. https://www.science.org/content/article/ebolas-heavy-toll-study-authors https://www.science.org/content/article/ebolas-heavy-toll-st...
  - smueller1234 13d ago
    As another comment points out: that's nothing compared to high energy/particle physics! The Pierre Auger Observatory certainly is a large collaboration for the astroparticle physics domain though. It's a big international collaboration. Quick anecdote: my name (S Mueller) is not on that paper's author list because we had a rule that you had to be in the collaboration for a year before getting authorship. You stayed on for a year after leaving. Very reasonable! At the time I was nonetheless a bit bummed about missing out on the big Science paper. I guess I'm on the retraction though ;)
derektank 15d ago
Are there any other candidate particles besides WIMPs that the observation could be from, assuming it’s a real signal?
- SaberTail 15d ago
  In one sense anything that passed all their background rejection is a WIMP. To interact with a nucleus through so much matter, it's not interacting electromagnetically. The main candidate for a strong force interaction would be a neutron, and they did a lot of work to model that and eliminate it as a background. So definitionally it would be a WIMP. They were pretty model agnostic in what they were looking for. They modeled and simulated a number of different ways a WIMP could interact with normal matter. If this is a discovery, more data will be needed to figure out the nature of that interaction and how it fits into particle physics. But there's always a chance it's something completely new, or some extremely rare manifestation of things we already know about, but have never seen before. And even if it is WIMP, it may not be the right type of WIMP (wrong mass, or wrong interaction strength) to explain cosmological dark matter.
  - imglorp 15d ago
    If neutrons are on the list, how are they ruled out from a random decay event emitting particles, from some mineral in the surrounding rock?
    - physicsdude 15d ago
      The detector from which data is taken to do this analysis contains 7 tons of liquid xenon. It is inside of a larger detector, which contains hundreds of tons of water and more than 10 tons of a scintillator. One of the functions of that outer detector is to absorb neutrons and other infiltrates coming from the rock. When doing this kind of thing, the analysts will plot the rate of events as a function of "distance from the outer surface" and confirm that it decreases, and in this case "is 0" inside of the detector used for analysis. But keep in mind that all statements are made statistically, so it's not that the event _can't_ be an external neutron, but that it is _very_ unlikely to be.
matthewdgreen 15d ago
This sort of thing is really useful for helping people to understand what the purpose of scientific publication is. It's not about presenting finished products to society, it's more like a Discord where you communicate new findings with other authors. Often the reason for a communication is because you found something weird, and you want other people to know about it so they can help you confirm or rule it out as bad data. People shouldn't feel gunshy about this. (My field even has a conference for failed results, CFAIL.) I like to highlight examples of this stuff, because I see so many angry online comments when a paper turns out to be "wrong" or doesn't replicate.
- irishcoffee 15d ago
  You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?
  - ajkjk 15d ago
    You think that people's findings should be communicated by email? that their email chains are what should go into the permanent record and be cited and printed out and included in journals and such? would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?
    - tomrod 15d ago
      That's how Linux is built. Science has too many threads to do it successfully though
      - Charon77 15d ago
        > would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much? Only quote the relevant part and reply to it, just like this very comment. And Linux has a large mailing archive of various lists and threads that are searchable and available to everyone and get this: free access
        14d ago
antonvs 14d ago
The mainstream TV news report that I saw about this ended with a comment about how we should continue to fund this detector. Made me wonder if the nature of this release involved forces other than purely scientific ones. Apparently funding has already been cut for the successor to the LUX-ZEPLIN detector.
- physicsdude 14d ago
  Particle physics is not a particularly large community. There is a hand-countable number of experiments like this, and the folks working on each of them know the folks working on each of the others. The collaborations executing each experiment are comprised of scientists employed by multiple independent institutions, both public and private, typically across national borders. Internally, the collaborations have a democratic structure with individual researchers acting as institutional representatives serving in what is essentially a parliamentary structure to make decisions. The software to determine results is always public within the collaboration and reviewed well in advance of making any truly public disclosure like this. Culturally, an attempt to intentionally distort or misrepresent data to suggest a result like this would not be tolerated. You can imagine a bad actor writing a single-author paper with fakery, but a collaboration at this level is inherently critical of itself and everyone holds each other accountable. But mistakes do happen. Exciting results or hints of exciting results can appear due to well-intentioned researchers making convenient mistakes which get glossed over for psychological reasons and then add up to appear as something significant. You can read about "blinding" (which is mentioned in the paper) to get a feel for the techniques researchers employ to not only guard against fabricating results intentionally, but even unintentionally.
  - IAmBroom 14d ago
    The small pool also lends itself to a lack of unbiased reviewers. If everyone in the community is more-or-less tied to the research, who can best objectively test it, from a blinded POV?
    - physicsdude 13d ago
deleted 14d ago
[deleted]
GuB-42 14d ago
> That said, particle physics history is full of 3 sigma particle "discoveries" that disappeared with more data. The idea is that because 3 sigma means a ~1/1000 chance of the thing being explained by random chance, 1 in 1000 experiments will produce a bogus 3 sigma result, and we do many thousands of experiments.
- adgjlsfhk1 13d ago
  and also because a result always has the caveats of "if we did our experimental design and math right". A 1/1000 rate of experimental/code design errors will double the number of incorrect 3 sigma results.

smueller1234 15d ago

Or this[2] 2007 Science paper on ultra high energy cosmic ray source candidates ("anisotropy") that we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved. It was a fascinating experience as a junior member to follow the collaboration internal conversation and investigation on this, because a lot of extremely principled scientists were clearly deeply worried about losing their hard earned reputation. In the end, I am convinced that we were simply unlucky. [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.2843 https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.2843

alexpotato 15d ago
> we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved. It's stories like this that raise my p(we are in a simulation).
WarmWash 15d ago
Reminds me of the FTL neutrinos too, where the scientist where pretty much "hey, something is wrong, can you help us figure it out?" and the general public were the ones screaming "OMG! Physics is dead!" Then when it comes out as measurement error, the public is all "Damn these scientists are all hype machine clowns..."
- dd8601fn 15d ago
  I’m fine with that. Put it at the feet of pop science blogging. I’m less fine with the time and resources spent on mouse models. They already know you’d get the same utility from a magic 8 ball, but they do it anyway.
  - gus_massa 15d ago
    Mouse models are useful to discard very bad ideas. There was a recent experiment to use bacteria to kill cancer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306894 They tried like 40 bacterias in vitro, then like 9 in mice, and only 1 was useful in mice and they will continue only with that, perhaps in humans. Anyway, as you suggest, there is a high chance it will fail. Also, you can do nasty stuff to mice that would never be allowed with humans. In that experiment they injected cancer cells in mice with a bad inmune system, so they could get like 90 mice with cancer and run the experiment in a short time. No ethical committee would approve that in humans.
  - IAmBroom 14d ago
    Your claim seems to be that testing medicines in animals is useless, because "everyone knows it's not going to work". Congratulations. You've just reduced all of medical science to the Tuskegee STD experiment.
- pfdietz 15d ago
  That was a fiendish thing to debug; if I recall correctly it was a slightly and intermittently defective connector.
- dguest 14d ago
  Unfortunately it wasn't just the public: it caused so much uproar within the experiment that two of the highest ranking members resigned their posts [1]. I was a bit dismayed at the reaction within the physics community. Experiments absolutely do need to follow procedures like blinding and careful internal review (especially before the data unblinding), but you can only spend so long designing the analysis before you unblind, and there are opportunity costs to cross checking everything. In an optimized community experiments will inevitably make mistakes. And once you unblind, it does no one any good to sit on an anomalous result forever. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10371 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10371
logdahl 15d ago
Wow haha, that is a lot of authors! Never seen this before!
- thiagotomei 14d ago
  The ATLAS-CMS joint Higgs boson mass measurement paper has close to 6000 authors: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803 I think the final COVID consortium report has something like 30k authors.
- kens 14d ago
  Most horrifying is a 2014 Science paper on Ebola with 58 authors, 5 of whom died of Ebola before publication. https://www.science.org/content/article/ebolas-heavy-toll-study-authors https://www.science.org/content/article/ebolas-heavy-toll-st...
- smueller1234 13d ago
  As another comment points out: that's nothing compared to high energy/particle physics! The Pierre Auger Observatory certainly is a large collaboration for the astroparticle physics domain though. It's a big international collaboration. Quick anecdote: my name (S Mueller) is not on that paper's author list because we had a rule that you had to be in the collaboration for a year before getting authorship. You stayed on for a year after leaving. Very reasonable! At the time I was nonetheless a bit bummed about missing out on the big Science paper. I guess I'm on the retraction though ;)

derektank 15d ago

Are there any other candidate particles besides WIMPs that the observation could be from, assuming it’s a real signal?

SaberTail 15d ago
In one sense anything that passed all their background rejection is a WIMP. To interact with a nucleus through so much matter, it's not interacting electromagnetically. The main candidate for a strong force interaction would be a neutron, and they did a lot of work to model that and eliminate it as a background. So definitionally it would be a WIMP. They were pretty model agnostic in what they were looking for. They modeled and simulated a number of different ways a WIMP could interact with normal matter. If this is a discovery, more data will be needed to figure out the nature of that interaction and how it fits into particle physics. But there's always a chance it's something completely new, or some extremely rare manifestation of things we already know about, but have never seen before. And even if it is WIMP, it may not be the right type of WIMP (wrong mass, or wrong interaction strength) to explain cosmological dark matter.
- imglorp 15d ago
  If neutrons are on the list, how are they ruled out from a random decay event emitting particles, from some mineral in the surrounding rock?
  - physicsdude 15d ago
    The detector from which data is taken to do this analysis contains 7 tons of liquid xenon. It is inside of a larger detector, which contains hundreds of tons of water and more than 10 tons of a scintillator. One of the functions of that outer detector is to absorb neutrons and other infiltrates coming from the rock. When doing this kind of thing, the analysts will plot the rate of events as a function of "distance from the outer surface" and confirm that it decreases, and in this case "is 0" inside of the detector used for analysis. But keep in mind that all statements are made statistically, so it's not that the event _can't_ be an external neutron, but that it is _very_ unlikely to be.

matthewdgreen 15d ago

This sort of thing is really useful for helping people to understand what the purpose of scientific publication is. It's not about presenting finished products to society, it's more like a Discord where you communicate new findings with other authors. Often the reason for a communication is because you found something weird, and you want other people to know about it so they can help you confirm or rule it out as bad data. People shouldn't feel gunshy about this. (My field even has a conference for failed results, CFAIL.) I like to highlight examples of this stuff, because I see so many angry online comments when a paper turns out to be "wrong" or doesn't replicate.

irishcoffee 15d ago
You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?
- ajkjk 15d ago
  You think that people's findings should be communicated by email? that their email chains are what should go into the permanent record and be cited and printed out and included in journals and such? would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?
  - tomrod 15d ago
    That's how Linux is built. Science has too many threads to do it successfully though
    - Charon77 15d ago
      > would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much? Only quote the relevant part and reply to it, just like this very comment. And Linux has a large mailing archive of various lists and threads that are searchable and available to everyone and get this: free access
      - 14d ago

antonvs 14d ago

The mainstream TV news report that I saw about this ended with a comment about how we should continue to fund this detector. Made me wonder if the nature of this release involved forces other than purely scientific ones. Apparently funding has already been cut for the successor to the LUX-ZEPLIN detector.

physicsdude 14d ago
Particle physics is not a particularly large community. There is a hand-countable number of experiments like this, and the folks working on each of them know the folks working on each of the others. The collaborations executing each experiment are comprised of scientists employed by multiple independent institutions, both public and private, typically across national borders. Internally, the collaborations have a democratic structure with individual researchers acting as institutional representatives serving in what is essentially a parliamentary structure to make decisions. The software to determine results is always public within the collaboration and reviewed well in advance of making any truly public disclosure like this. Culturally, an attempt to intentionally distort or misrepresent data to suggest a result like this would not be tolerated. You can imagine a bad actor writing a single-author paper with fakery, but a collaboration at this level is inherently critical of itself and everyone holds each other accountable. But mistakes do happen. Exciting results or hints of exciting results can appear due to well-intentioned researchers making convenient mistakes which get glossed over for psychological reasons and then add up to appear as something significant. You can read about "blinding" (which is mentioned in the paper) to get a feel for the techniques researchers employ to not only guard against fabricating results intentionally, but even unintentionally.
- IAmBroom 14d ago
  The small pool also lends itself to a lack of unbiased reviewers. If everyone in the community is more-or-less tied to the research, who can best objectively test it, from a blinded POV?
  - physicsdude 13d ago

deleted 14d ago

[deleted]

GuB-42 14d ago

> That said, particle physics history is full of 3 sigma particle "discoveries" that disappeared with more data. The idea is that because 3 sigma means a ~1/1000 chance of the thing being explained by random chance, 1 in 1000 experiments will produce a bogus 3 sigma result, and we do many thousands of experiments.

adgjlsfhk1 13d ago
and also because a result always has the caveats of "if we did our experimental design and math right". A 1/1000 rate of experimental/code design errors will double the number of incorrect 3 sigma results.