Large Underground Xenon Detector
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The Large Underground Xenon Detector (LUX) is a future two-phase liquid xenon detector of dark matter particles. Two-phase liquid noble element detectors detect weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading dark matter candidate, by measuring the scintillation and ionization released when WIMPs collide with atoms in the liquid. WIMPs are expected to interact only with nuclei. Most of the events observed in such detectors will be gammas which interact predominantly with the electrons, which result in a different ionization signature than that of the WIMP nuclear collisions. This difference allows such detectors remove much of the background events.
The first iteration of the detector will contain roughly 200 kg of xenon. For comparison, the first competitive two-phase liquid xenon dark matter detector Xenon10 contained only 10 kg of xenon.
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