New data from the PandaX-II particle detector in China leave open the possibility that the XENON1T experiment in Italy has found evidence of new physics. In June 2020 researchers working on XENON1T announced the detection of around 50 events above background levels and concluded that hypothetical solar axions or very magnetic neutrinos might be responsible. The new results from PandaX-II are consistent with these hypotheses but further work will be needed to settle the issue.
XENONIT was built to hunt for a type of dark matter known as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Housed under a mountain at Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory, it contained 3.5 tonne of liquid xenon and operated between 2016-2018. Like other experiments of its type, it was designed to pick up the tiny flashes of light generated when WIMPs in the “halo” of dark matter thought to envelop the Milky Way collide with xenon nuclei.
The events reported in 2020 involved electron, rather than nuclear, recoils. Elena Aprile of Columbia University in the US and colleagues reported 53±15 such recoils at low energy that they could not tie to other identifiable sources of background (these events themselves being considered noise in the search for WIMPs). Careful not to claim any discovery, they instead laid out several possible explanations for the observation.
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