The research, carried out by Giorgio Arcadi of the University of Messina and INFN Catania, Abdelhak Djouadi of the University of Granada, and Stefano Profumo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, focuses on a theoretical framework known as the 2HD+a model. This construction extends the Standard Model of particle physics by adding two Higgs doublets, which give rise to two neutral scalar bosons, a pair of charged Higgs particles, and two CP-odd pseudoscalar states. One of these pseudoscalars is a light singlet field that mixes with the heavier doublet component through an angle theta, and it serves as the mediator between dark matter and ordinary matter. The dark matter candidate itself is a fermionic particle coupled to the two CP-odd bosons, and the model has become the primary benchmark that the ATLAS and CMS collaborations use to guide dark matter searches at the Large Hadron Collider.

What makes this framework especially interesting is the behavior of pseudoscalar-mediated interactions at low velocities. When dark matter particles scatter off nuclei in a detector, they move slowly compared with the speed of light, and in this non-relativistic limit, interactions mediated by pseudoscalars are suppressed by the momentum transferred in the collision. At tree level, the scattering is helicity-suppressed, meaning the direct detection cross-section becomes extraordinarily small. The dominant contribution instead arises only at one-loop order, through box and triangle diagrams involving virtual Higgs bosons circulating in quantum loops. This suppression is precisely what can push viable dark matter scenarios below the neutrino fog, where conventional searches lose their clean discovery power but where the particles may still be hiding.

Crucially, the same suppression does not apply to the processes that governed dark matter production in the early Universe. Annihilation of dark matter particles in the hot primordial plasma proceeds at much higher velocities, where s-wave contributions dominate and are not suppressed by the pseudoscalar structure. This means the model can simultaneously satisfy the observed relic density of dark matter, measured precisely by the Planck satellite, while predicting scattering cross-sections far below current experimental sensitivity. The researchers performed extensive parameter scans using the micrOMEGAs package together with purpose-built codes for the loop-induced scattering cross-section, generating roughly ten thousand viable model points in their main scan and about one thousand in a subsidiary scan designed to explore fine-tuned regions of parameter space.

The team organized their analysis into three distinct regimes based on the strength of the mixing between the singlet and doublet pseudoscalar states. In the standard regime with substantial mixing, they found that a significant fraction of parameter space naturally falls inside the neutrino fog, particularly for dark matter masses above roughly one hundred gigaelectronvolts, where annihilation into pairs of Higgs bosons becomes kinematically accessible and governs the freeze-out process. Current limits from the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment and from Fermi-LAT observations of dwarf spheroidal galaxies already constrain much of this territory, but projected sensitivities of the next-generation XLZD observatory and the Cherenkov Telescope Array will probe deeper into the surviving regions.

In the regime of strongly suppressed mixing, where the mixing angle drops below one part in a thousand, the phenomenology changes dramatically. The annihilation channel into fermion pairs becomes negligible, and freeze-out proceeds almost exclusively through annihilation into pairs of Higgs bosons or into heavy CP-even states. The direct detection cross-section becomes entirely loop-induced, sinking comfortably into the neutrino fog for the smallest mixing values. Remarkably, the same suppression that hides dark matter from direct detection also extends the lifetime of the light pseudoscalar to macroscopic scales, producing displaced-vertex signatures at the Large Hadron Collider that are within the acceptance of existing ATLAS searches for long-lived particles. This creates a genuine complementarity between underground dark matter experiments and collider physics, because parameter points that are difficult to reach through conventional dark matter searches may be accessible through displaced hadronic jets at the LHC.

The most extreme case, where the mixing angle vanishes entirely, produces something qualitatively different: a two-component dark matter scenario. In this limit, the light pseudoscalar becomes a pure singlet with no direct coupling to Standard Model fermions, and if its mass falls below half the mass of the fermionic dark matter candidate, it becomes cosmologically stable and constitutes a second dark matter component alongside the fermion. The researchers solved the coupled Boltzmann equations governing the evolution of both components in the early Universe and found that the pseudoscalar component, which scatters off nucleons at tree level through exchange of the heavy CP-even Higgs boson, produces direct detection signals that are already strongly constrained by current data. Most of the viable parameter space in this two-component scenario is disfavored by existing limits alone, making it the most tightly constrained of the three regimes the team explored.

The study also identified ways to broaden the viable parameter space in both single-component and two-component scenarios by imposing specific relations among the model parameters that suppress the coupling between the 125-GeV Higgs boson and pairs of light pseudoscalars. This fine-tuning, which requires adjusting quartic couplings in the scalar potential to precisions of a few percent, opens up regions at lower dark matter masses that would otherwise be excluded. In these tuned regions, the correct relic density is achieved through p-wave suppressed annihilation processes, and the resulting parameter points populate the neutrino fog with a distinctive narrow strip in the plane of dark matter mass versus coupling strength.

Looking forward, the authors argue that their results provide strong motivation to fully exploit future ton-scale detectors such as XLZD, which will extend sensitivity by another order of magnitude beyond current liquid xenon experiments like PandaX-4T, XENONnT, and LUX-ZEPLIN. But they also emphasize that direct detection alone will not be sufficient. The complementarity between direct detection, indirect detection through gamma-ray observations, and collider searches for displaced vertices means that the Cherenkov Telescope Array, rather than the next generation of xenon experiments, may be the instrument that first probes the sub-floor parameter space identified in this work, particularly for dark matter masses in the range of one hundred to several hundred gigaelectronvolts.

The broader lesson emerging from this analysis is that the neutrino fog should not be understood as a barrier marking the end of the WIMP paradigm, but rather as a threshold beyond which the multichannel nature of dark matter phenomenology becomes essential. Neither direct detection alone, nor indirect detection alone, nor collider searches alone can fully characterize the parameter space explored here. The combination of all three approaches is necessary and, taken together, largely sufficient to probe the model across the full mass range from ten gigaelectronvolts to several teraelectronvolts. As experiments push toward the fog, the theoretical framework developed in this study offers a concrete roadmap for interpreting whatever signals, or absences of signals, the coming decade of dark matter searches may reveal.

Subject of Research: Dark matter phenomenology of the 2HD+a model and its detectability below the neutrino fog

Article Title: Charting dark matter down to the neutrino floor/fog in the 2HD+a scenario

Article References: Charting dark matter down to the neutrino floor/fog in the 2HD+a scenario. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2026.1920686

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fphy.2026.1920686

Keywords: dark matter, WIMP, neutrino fog, 2HD+a model, direct detection, indirect detection, LHC, pseudoscalar mediator, Higgs physics, XLZD, Cherenkov Telescope Array, relic density

Intensity modulation with direct detection, or IM/DD, has long been the workhorse of cost-sensitive optical links. A laser is switched or modulated in brightness, and a simple photodiode at the far end converts the light back into an electrical signal. It is compact, energy-efficient and inexpensive, which is precisely why it dominates short-reach systems. The trouble begins as symbol rates climb. At 200 gigabaud, the spectral width of the signal becomes so large that chromatic dispersion, the tendency of optical fibre to smear different wavelengths of light at slightly different speeds, wreaks havoc. The signal develops frequency-dependent power fading, deep notches in its spectrum that can obliterate information before it ever reaches the receiver.

Conventional fixes are unattractive at this scale. Digital dispersion compensation demands enormous signal-processing power and bandwidth-hungry analogue-to-digital converters. Coherent detection, which measures both the amplitude and phase of light, solves the problem elegantly but at a price in complexity, power consumption and cost that is hard to justify for the short links that connect data centres or serve homes through passive optical networks. The research consortium, spanning the University of Southampton, the University of West Attica, the Technical University of Denmark, CEA-Leti and Ghent University working with imec, took a different route: fix the problem in the optical domain before the signal is ever detected.

The team’s solution is an architecture they call recurrent optical spectrum slicing, or ROSS, implemented as a photonic integrated circuit. The concept is a form of optical preprocessing that provides frequency-diversity detection. Instead of letting a single photodiode see the whole, dispersion-distorted spectrum, the ROSS receiver splits the incoming signal into multiple spectral slices and recombines them in a recurrent configuration, generating several complementary intensity-domain observations of the same data stream. Because the power-fading notches induced by dispersion fall at different points in each sliced observation, information lost in one slice survives in another, allowing the original data to be reconstructed.

The elegance of the approach lies in what it removes from the receiver’s electronic burden. By performing the heavy lifting optically, the ROSS receiver allows the system to use low-bandwidth electro-optic components, which are cheaper, more readily available and consume less power than the ultra-wideband devices that a 200-gigabaud signal would otherwise require. Recovery of the data then relies on simple feed-forward equalization, a lightweight digital technique, rather than the computationally intensive compensation schemes that would be needed to undo dispersion after detection.

The experimental results are striking. The researchers demonstrated intensity-modulated, direct-detected transmission of 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation, or PAM-4, at 160 gigabaud over 50 kilometres of uncompensated standard single-mode fibre, and at 175 gigabaud over 25 kilometres. Pushing further, they transmitted 200-gigabaud on-off keying, the simplest modulation format of all, over 75 kilometres of the same uncompensated fibre. These figures translate into a measured dispersion tolerance of up to 2.4 times 10 to the power of 5 gigabaud-picoseconds per nanometre, a metric that quantifies how much dispersion a signal of a given symbol rate can endure.

To put those numbers in perspective, uncompensated standard single-mode fibre accumulates roughly 17 picoseconds per nanometre per kilometre of dispersion at telecommunication wavelengths. A 200-gigabaud signal over 75 kilometres therefore accumulates a dispersion-length product that would ordinarily produce catastrophic power fading in a conventional direct-detection receiver. That the ROSS architecture handles this with simple components and modest equalization suggests a practical path to scaling short-reach links without migrating to coherent technology.

The implications reach well beyond the laboratory. Passive optical networks, the fibre-to-the-home infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of subscribers, are under pressure to deliver ever higher bit rates while keeping per-user costs and power consumption low. Data centre operators face a similar squeeze, as artificial intelligence workloads drive explosive growth in the traffic flowing between servers and switches over links of a few hundred metres to a few tens of kilometres. A receiver that keeps the cost and simplicity of direct detection while tolerating dispersion at 200 gigabaud could reshape the economics of both markets, reducing the energy footprint of the optical layer at exactly the moment when its power draw has become a strategic concern.

The photonic integration aspect is equally significant. By fabricating the spectrum-slicing receiver as an integrated chip, the team moves the concept from a bench-top arrangement of discrete components toward a manufacturable device that could be mass-produced using established foundry processes. Integration shrinks size, improves stability against environmental drift, and lowers packaging cost, all prerequisites for adoption in the high-volume, cost-sensitive segments where IM/DD reigns. The work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe PROMETHEUS project, the H2020 NEoteRIC project, the Villum Foundations OPTIC-AI project, and the UK’s EPSRC HASC Telecommunications Hub and DSIT REASON programmes, with experiments conducted at the University of Southampton’s X-band laboratories.

Challenges remain before such receivers appear in commercial transceivers, including refining the equalization algorithms and demonstrating performance across the temperature and manufacturing variations of real deployments. But the demonstration marks a clear milestone: a photonic chip that lets the humblest optical modulation format carry some of the highest symbol rates yet achieved over dispersive fibre, using detection hardware that a network operator could actually afford. As data demand continues its relentless climb, solutions that trade silicon-area optical ingenuity for expensive electronics are likely to become increasingly central to the internet’s physical backbone.

Subject of Research: Photonic integrated recurrent optical spectrum slicing receivers for dispersion-tolerant high-speed direct-detection optical communications

Article Title: Photonic integrated recurrent spectrum slicer enabling low complexity direct detection over 200 GBaud dispersive links

Article References: Liu, H., Sozos, K., Teofilovic, I., Wantee, S., Bottrill, K. R. H., Malhouitre, S., Garcia, S., Sarantoglou, G., Bienstman, P., Charbonnier, B., Mesaritakis, C., Vigliar, C., Da Ros, F., Bogris, A., & Petropoulos, P. (2026). Photonic integrated recurrent spectrum slicer enabling low complexity direct detection over 200 GBaud dispersive links. Communications Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44172-026-00801-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44172-026-00801-6

Keywords: photonic integration, optical communications, direct detection, chromatic dispersion, spectrum slicing, PAM-4, on-off keying, passive optical networks, data centre interconnects, feed-forward equalization, IM/DD, fibre optics

The core problem the team addresses is kinematic. Conventional direct detection experiments, such as XENON, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) and PandaX, watch for the tiny nuclear recoils produced when a dark matter particle from the Galactic halo smashes into an atomic nucleus in a detector. But halo dark matter moves at only about 220 kilometres per second, roughly a thousandth the speed of light. A particle weighing less than a gigaelectronvolt (GeV), far lighter than a proton, simply cannot deliver enough momentum to produce a recoil above the keV-scale thresholds of these instruments. The result is a vast, theoretically motivated wilderness of parameter space, the entire sub-GeV regime, where ordinary direct detection is essentially blind.

The cosmic-ray boosted dark matter framework, or CRDM, offers a way through. Relativistic cosmic rays pervade the Galaxy, streaming at energies vastly exceeding those of the sluggish halo particles. When a cosmic ray elastically scatters off a dark matter particle, it can transfer an enormous fraction of its kinetic energy, kicking the dark matter up to velocities approaching a tenth the speed of light. Such a boosted particle carries enough punch to deposit a detectable keV-scale recoil even in a large liquid xenon detector buried more than a kilometre underground. The idea, first formalised by Bringmann and Pospelov and by Ema and colleagues in 2019, has since matured into a serious probe, and the LZ collaboration itself has applied it to derive model-independent bounds on the dark matter-nucleon scattering cross section.

What the new study adds is particle-physics structure. Rather than treating the interaction as a featureless constant, the authors embed the scattering in four benchmark simplified models, in which a Dirac fermion dark matter particle communicates with nucleons through a mediator: a scalar, a vector, a pseudoscalar or an axial-vector boson. Scalar and vector exchange produces spin-independent scattering, which benefits from coherent enhancement across all the nucleons in a nucleus, scaling with the square of the atomic mass. Pseudoscalar and axial-vector exchange produces spin-dependent scattering, which lacks that enhancement and is best probed by detectors containing hydrogen, such as the Borexino neutrino experiment in Italy. For each model the team wrote down the full interaction Lagrangians, the differential cross sections including hadronic and nuclear form factors, and the resulting flux of boosted dark matter arriving at Earth.

The calculation chains together several layers of astrophysics and particle physics. Starting from the local interstellar spectra of cosmic-ray nuclei up to nickel (atomic number 28), the authors integrate over the scattering kinematics to obtain the differential flux of boosted dark matter, weighted by the local dark matter density of about 0.3 GeV per cubic centimetre and an effective propagation distance that encodes the Galactic dark matter distribution under a Navarro-Frenk-White halo profile. They then track the boosted particles as they descend through the atmosphere and kilometres of rock, losing energy through further elastic scattering, before computing the event rate they would generate in the detector target. Crucially, the mediator propagator factor, one over the square of the mediator mass plus the momentum transfer squared, is kept in full rather than approximated, which turns out to matter enormously for light mediators.

Using published exclusion curves from LZ, XENON1T, XENONnT, MiniBooNE and Borexino, the team derived constraints on both the scattering cross section and the underlying coupling product, the combination of the dark matter and nucleon couplings normalised by four pi, for mediator masses spanning from a millionth of a GeV up to 1 GeV. In the model-independent, constant cross section case, the interplay between detector depth and sensitivity produces a distinctive band of exclusion. Cross sections that are too small yield no detectable excess, while cross sections that are too large cause the boosted dark matter to scatter out in the Earth’s crust before it ever reaches the detector. Because LZ and XENON sit roughly 1400 metres underground while MiniBooNE lies just below the surface, the experiments are complementary: the shallow detector catches the very large cross sections that deep experiments cannot see, stitching together a much wider excluded region.

The most striking theoretical result concerns the momentum dependence of light mediators. When the mediator mass falls below roughly 10 MeV, the propagator forces the differential cross section to scale approximately as the inverse fourth power of the momentum transfer. Scattering is then overwhelmingly dominated by small momentum transfers, pushing the recoil spectrum to energies right at the threshold of detection. In this regime LZ, with its exceptionally low energy threshold and the coherence boost of spin-independent interactions, delivers the strongest constraints. For heavier mediators the low-momentum enhancement disappears, sensitivity becomes statistics-driven, and high-exposure neutrino experiments such as Borexino become competitive. The authors also show that the common contact-interaction approximation, which assumes the amplitude scales as the inverse fourth power of the mediator mass, breaks down badly once the mediator mass drops below the characteristic momentum transfer of the recoil, rendering dashed-line approximations unreliable exactly where the new physics is most interesting.

Perhaps the most elegant feature of the results is a characteristic turnover in the exclusion limits for mediator masses around ten to the minus two to ten to the minus three GeV. This kink marks the transition between two regimes: above it, the mediator mass term dominates the propagator and the constraints track the mass; below it, the momentum transfer takes over and the limits flatten and shift. The team compared their dark matter bounds with independent constraints on light mediators from meson decays, stellar cooling, and the trapping and cooling limits from supernova SN1987A, noting that recasting those astrophysical and collider bounds onto the dark matter coupling product requires additional assumptions that they adopt consistently from earlier work.

The broader significance is twofold. Practically, the analysis extends the reach of existing detectors, machines built primarily to hunt for WIMPs, deep into the sub-GeV window without pouring a single extra litre of xenon. Conceptually, it demonstrates that momentum dependence is not a technical footnote but a decisive factor in interpreting any direct detection limit involving light mediators, and that the uncertainties in the Galactic dark matter distribution, which make the constraints scale with the square root of the effective propagation distance, must be handled honestly. As boosted dark matter searches mature, the crossover regions identified here, where detector thresholds, overburden attenuation and mediator dynamics all compete, are precisely where the next generation of experiments should focus if the universe’s most abundant matter particle is hiding below a GeV.

Subject of Research: Cosmic-ray boosted sub-GeV dark matter detection constraints via light mediator models

Article Title: New constraints on cosmic-ray boosted sub-Gev dark matter via light mediators

Article References: Yu, Y., Wang, G.-S., Zhang, B., Tang, T.-P., Su, B.-Y., & Feng, L. (2026). New constraints on cosmic-ray boosted sub-Gev dark matter via light mediators. The European Physical Journal C, 86(9), Article 1081. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-026-16368-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-026-16368-7

Keywords: dark matter, cosmic rays, sub-GeV dark matter, light mediators, direct detection, LZ experiment, XENON, Borexino, spin-independent scattering, spin-dependent scattering, particle astrophysics, mediator propagator

The central challenge of any direct-detection dark matter experiment is separation. If weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, exist, they should occasionally strike a xenon nucleus, producing a tiny recoil that scintillation light and ionization electrons record. But gamma rays and beta particles from residual radioactivity in detector materials produce electronic recoils that look superficially similar. LZ’s main line of defense has been charge-to-light discrimination, which exploits the fact that nuclear recoils and electronic recoils produce different ratios of ionization charge to scintillation light. That method already rejects electronic recoil backgrounds with high efficiency, but every additional layer of rejection translates directly into better sensitivity to the vanishingly rare signals the experiment is built to find.

Pulse shape discrimination offers a second, independent handle. When energy is deposited in liquid xenon, scintillation light emerges from excited xenon dimers that can occupy either a singlet or a triplet molecular state. These states decay with different lifetimes, and crucially, nuclear recoils preferentially excite the singlet state, producing a flash with a steeper rising edge, while electronic recoils favor the triplet state and produce a longer tail. In liquid argon detectors, where the two lifetimes differ by more than two orders of magnitude, this effect is so pronounced that it serves as the dominant background rejection method. In liquid xenon, however, the singlet and triplet lifetimes are only about 3 and 26 nanoseconds respectively, a difference so small that most experiments have treated pulse shape information as marginal at best.

The LZ team attacked this limitation with an unusually rigorous timing analysis. The first hurdle was instrumental: differences in cable lengths, electronics, and operating voltages mean that each of the 494 photomultiplier tubes lining the detector responds with its own timing offset. Using an embedded LED calibration system, the collaboration measured these channel-to-channel offsets to better than one nanosecond. The deeper challenge was that individual photomultiplier waveforms often contain multiple overlapping photons, each contributing a pulse roughly 60 nanoseconds wide. Rather than treating the waveform as a single lump, the team developed an N-photon model that fits the waveform as a sum of up to three single-photoelectron templates, using Bayes’ theorem to decide how many photons each waveform actually contains, while accounting for the roughly 23 percent chance that a single photon produces two photoelectrons.

With photon arrival times reconstructed event by event, the collaboration compared timing distributions from two calibration sources: tritiated methane, which produces electronic recoils, and deuterium-deuterium neutrons, which produce nuclear recoils. As expected, the nuclear recoil spectra showed photons clustered earlier in time, while electronic recoil events exhibited longer tails. To convert this difference into a usable discriminator, the team defined a tail fraction, the ratio of photons counted in an optimized early time window to the total number of photons in the pulse. Counting individual photons rather than integrating raw current eliminated the smearing effects of the photomultiplier response and improved resolution. The boundaries of the early window were then optimized for each pulse size using a raster scan followed by a stochastic gradient descent algorithm, with the data repeatedly split into optimization and verification sets to guard against overfitting.

The performance exceeded expectations for a xenon detector. For scintillation pulses above 20 detected photons, the fraction of electronic recoil events leaking into the region occupied by half of the nuclear recoils ranged from 15 to 35 percent, reaching as low as 14 percent for the largest pulses studied. For a specific and troublesome background, the double electron capture of xenon-124, whose suppressed charge yield causes it to masquerade as a nuclear recoil under charge-to-light analysis, simulations showed that pulse shape discrimination reduces leakage to roughly 5 percent and outperforms charge-to-light discrimination above 95 detected photons. The team also derived a position-dependent correction to account for the fact that photons generated deeper in the detector spend longer in transit, extending the technique across the full detector volume rather than just the upper third where neutron calibration data were available.

To understand the physics underlying these results and to project performance, the collaboration tuned the photon timing model of the NEST simulation framework against the calibration data. The fit confirmed the singlet and triplet lifetimes previously measured in smaller experiments and extracted recombination time constants of essentially zero for nuclear recoils and about 3.7 nanoseconds for electronic recoils, consistent with the field-dependent recombination model built into NEST. The transit of photons through the detector, including reflections and scattering, was modeled with a combination of direct and exponential components whose parameters vary smoothly with depth. The agreement between simulation and data validated the emission parameters and provided an estimate of the best possible pulse shape performance, while also confirming that the depth correction applies equally to both interaction types.

The most consequential result comes from combining the two methods. The team constructed a two-factor discriminator, a linear combination of the charge-to-light output and the corrected tail fraction, with the weighting between them optimized as a function of pulse size. Because calibration data contained too few leaking events for a traditional counting-based evaluation, the collaboration instead quantified the separation between electronic and nuclear recoil distributions using a Z-score approach, previously employed by Xenon10 and other pulse shape studies. In the largest pulse bin, the separation improved from 3.65 to 3.83 standard deviations, cutting the corresponding false positive rate from 1.3 times ten to the minus four to 0.6 times ten to the minus four, a factor of two reduction. Applied to the WIMP search data collected between March 2023 and April 2024, the combined discriminator halved the number of events falling in the nuclear recoil band, from four to two, and all four events in the charge-to-light band were classified as electronic recoils by their pulse shapes alone.

The implications reach beyond LZ. The demonstration that photon timing carries exploitable information in a detector of this scale establishes a feasibility case for next-generation liquid xenon experiments, where every increment in background rejection buys sensitivity to ever fainter dark matter signals. The technique may prove even more powerful at lower drift fields, where enhanced recombination lengthens the timing differences between interaction types. And for backgrounds like xenon-124 double electron capture, which will only grow more relevant as exposures increase, pulse shape discrimination offers a complementary tool precisely in the energy range where other methods weaken. For now, the null result from the WIMP search data stands, but the machinery built to interpret those flickers of xenon light has become measurably sharper, and the hunt for the universe’s missing mass has gained a second pair of eyes.

Subject of Research: Pulse shape discrimination for electronic recoil background rejection in the LUX-ZEPLIN liquid xenon dark matter detector

Article Title: Pushing the limits of pulse shape discrimination in a large liquid xenon detector

Article References: LZ Collaboration, Akerib, D. S., Al Musalhi, A. K., Alder, F., Almquist, B. J., Amarasinghe, C. S., Ames, A., Anderson, T. J., Angelides, N., Araújo, H. M., Armstrong, J. E., Arthurs, M., Baker, A., Balashov, S., Bang, J., Bargemann, J. W., Barillier, E. E., Beattie, K., Bhatti, A., … Zhou, Y. (2026). Pushing the limits of pulse shape discrimination in a large liquid xenon detector. The European Physical Journal C, 86(9), Article 1060. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-026-16216-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-026-16216-8

Keywords: dark matter, LUX-ZEPLIN, liquid xenon, pulse shape discrimination, WIMPs, background rejection, scintillation, photon timing, NEST simulation, two-factor discrimination, xenon-124 double electron capture, direct detection