Speaker
Description
After many years of careful design and construction, the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment is finally taking data. Located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, LZ employs a dual-phase Time Projection Chamber to search for dark matter particles. With an active volume of 7 tonnes and a three-component veto system (xenon skin, gadolinium-loaded liquid scintillator outer detector, and an ultrapure water tank), LZ has a projected sensitivity of 1.4E-48 cm^2 for the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section at 40 GeV/c^2 in 1000 live days. In this talk, I will discuss the statistical methods that LZ uses in assessing its sensitivity to physics processes. Among other topics, I will describe relevant aspects of the likelihood construction, goodness-of-fit method and the Profile Likelihood Ratio (PLR) analysis, and their application to early LZ data.
