On: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle

[sylware]

This is statistical significance ! WE NEED A BIGGER DETECTOR! GI'ME MONEY!

[evanb → sylware]

The total cost of this experiment may be a lot less than you expect. I'd encourage you to make a guess as to what you think it could cost the US taxpayer and then check what the Department of Energy contributed [1].

The LZ collaboration is going to run their machine until at least 2030. They have almost no hope of making a meaningfully larger detector, no will you hear them suggest one. Their detector is already designed at such a scale that it contains a substantial fraction of all the needed xenon isotope available on Earth.

[1] https://news.wisc.edu/dark-matter-detection-receives-10-ton-...

[sylware → evanb]

So this is a big enough detector? That would mean they need to wait for such events to occur again and again towards this "5sigmas".

Hopefully, other aparatus elsewhere are big enough too in order to spot similar events.

[evanb → sylware]

No one knows if it’s big enough—-that depends on the properties of dark matter and its interaction with xenon.

[sylware → evanb]

It is all about that single data point, which means that detector was big enough for that data point.

[evanb → sylware]

But you could collect this data point by chance in a bigger or smaller detector.

What I was addressing was whether this detector is big enough for a reliable discovery. In that case what you really want to constrain is the rate, such-and-such events per kilogram of xenon per year (the per-kilogram-of-xenon can be traded for a per-liter rate given the density of the xenon).