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Particle physics is not a particularly large community. There is a hand-countable number of experiments like this, and the folks working on each of them know th

Particle physics is not a particularly large community. There is a hand-countable number of experiments like this, and the folks working on each of them know the folks working on each of the others. The collaborations executing each experiment are comprised of scientists employed by multiple independent institutions, both public and private, typically across national borders. Internally, the collaborations have a democratic structure with individual researchers acting as institutional representatives serving in what is essentially a parliamentary structure to make decisions. The software to determine results is always public within the collaboration and reviewed well in advance of making any truly public disclosure like this. Culturally, an attempt to intentionally distort or misrepresent data to suggest a result like this would not be tolerated. You can imagine a bad actor writing a single-author paper with fakery, but a collaboration at this level is inherently critical of itself and everyone holds each other accountable. But mistakes do happen. Exciting results or hints of exciting results can appear due to well-intentioned researchers making convenient mistakes which get glossed over for psychological reasons and then add up to appear as something significant. You can read about "blinding" (which is mentioned in the paper) to get a feel for the techniques researchers employ to not only guard against fabricating results intentionally, but even unintentionally.

IAmBroom 29d ago
The small pool also lends itself to a lack of unbiased reviewers. If everyone in the community is more-or-less tied to the research, who can best objectively test it, from a blinded POV?
- physicsdude 28d ago
  That is a great point. I'm not sure if I fully understand your question, but I'll comment on both "testing," meaning doing the analysis, and "reviewing," meaning peer review. The point of "blinding," as I mentioned it before, is to guard against biasing the result due to choices made by analysts while figuring out how to compute their final answer. Part of that is just psychological --- if an analyst _knows_ that the data is obscured, for lack of a better term, in a way such that they can't believe a signal that they see (for example --- that's just one way to blind), then they won't feel any emotion or excitement about things they encounter while constructing the analysis, because they know what they're looking at isn't real, and that helps them to maintain objectivity. It's also common to have multiple independent analysis teams for something like this --- they know that they'll have embarrassed themselves if they don't all get the same result both before and after unblinding, which provides pressure to maintain objectivity. As far as review goes --- there are physicists who believe in dark matter, and there are physicists who don't believe in dark matter. But all particle physicists and nuclear physicists use the same core technical and statistical methods. For a result like this, there will be a few "core analysts" who do the analysis, typically graduate students and postdocs. Their advisors review their work, through the lens of making sure that they are doing so sanely. The collaboration will also establish an internal review committee to comb through the documentation and software which produced the result, not necessarily trying to disprove what they found, but really looking at it critically. Once it gets to a journal, they'll get reviewers who may be biased for or against the result, and who may or may not work directly on dark matter detection, but who can all assess the methodology by which the result was obtained. That's probably the best we can do with humans involved.
antonvs 28d ago
I'm not suggesting distortion or misrepresentation of the published result. The actual preprint is quite clear on the nature and limitations of the result, and there's no reason to think that what they're reporting didn't happen as described. However, the context here is that the DOE has already paused funding for the experiment's successor, XLZD, for an unspecified amount of time which realistically, is probably going to depend on the next US presidential election. At the same time, the DOE encouraged the LZ project to develop scenarios for continuing to operating beyond its current end date of 2028. Now, here's what the NBC Bay Area report I mentioned[0] ended with: > "All the more reason, they say, to keep these machines running. [...] They'd like to keep the machines running, they wanna keep doing this research, they're applying for funding now, so fingers crossed, we'll have more updates on this [...]" The media attention this received was not the organic result of some journalist noticing the preprint or the talk at TeVPA in Japan. There was a major wave of synchronized official press releases, coinciding with the TeVPA talk, from Berkeley National Lab[1], Brown University[2], SLAC[3], Brookhaven[4], Stanford[5], University of Sydney[6], and others including UMass Amherst and Imperial College London. Now, these institutions are all involved in the collaboration somehow, so it makes sense that they would coordinate press releases for a major result. The question is whether this result warrants such treatment. It's a single event at 2.6 sigma global significance. Promoting it in this way was a choice, and I'm pointing out that it seems quite possible - in fact I'd say extremely likely - that that choice was made with the funding situation top of mind. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf3aW0xTEEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf3aW0xTEEc [1] https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/09/01/lz-sees-surprising-result-in-search-for-dark-matter/ https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/09/01/lz-sees-surprising-res... [2] https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-09-01/lz-dark-matter-results https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-09-01/lz-dark-matter-results [3] https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2026-09-01-lz-sees-surprising-result-search-dark-matter https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2026-09-01-lz-sees-surpr... [4] https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=123133 https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=123133 [5] https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/09/dark-matter-detection-signal-lz https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/09/dark-matter-detect... [6] https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2026/09/03/lz-experiment-sees-surprising-result-in-search-for-dark-matter.html https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2026/09/03/lz-ex...
- 28d ago

IAmBroom 29d ago

The small pool also lends itself to a lack of unbiased reviewers. If everyone in the community is more-or-less tied to the research, who can best objectively test it, from a blinded POV?

physicsdude 28d ago
That is a great point. I'm not sure if I fully understand your question, but I'll comment on both "testing," meaning doing the analysis, and "reviewing," meaning peer review. The point of "blinding," as I mentioned it before, is to guard against biasing the result due to choices made by analysts while figuring out how to compute their final answer. Part of that is just psychological --- if an analyst _knows_ that the data is obscured, for lack of a better term, in a way such that they can't believe a signal that they see (for example --- that's just one way to blind), then they won't feel any emotion or excitement about things they encounter while constructing the analysis, because they know what they're looking at isn't real, and that helps them to maintain objectivity. It's also common to have multiple independent analysis teams for something like this --- they know that they'll have embarrassed themselves if they don't all get the same result both before and after unblinding, which provides pressure to maintain objectivity. As far as review goes --- there are physicists who believe in dark matter, and there are physicists who don't believe in dark matter. But all particle physicists and nuclear physicists use the same core technical and statistical methods. For a result like this, there will be a few "core analysts" who do the analysis, typically graduate students and postdocs. Their advisors review their work, through the lens of making sure that they are doing so sanely. The collaboration will also establish an internal review committee to comb through the documentation and software which produced the result, not necessarily trying to disprove what they found, but really looking at it critically. Once it gets to a journal, they'll get reviewers who may be biased for or against the result, and who may or may not work directly on dark matter detection, but who can all assess the methodology by which the result was obtained. That's probably the best we can do with humans involved.

antonvs 28d ago

I'm not suggesting distortion or misrepresentation of the published result. The actual preprint is quite clear on the nature and limitations of the result, and there's no reason to think that what they're reporting didn't happen as described. However, the context here is that the DOE has already paused funding for the experiment's successor, XLZD, for an unspecified amount of time which realistically, is probably going to depend on the next US presidential election. At the same time, the DOE encouraged the LZ project to develop scenarios for continuing to operating beyond its current end date of 2028. Now, here's what the NBC Bay Area report I mentioned[0] ended with: > "All the more reason, they say, to keep these machines running. [...] They'd like to keep the machines running, they wanna keep doing this research, they're applying for funding now, so fingers crossed, we'll have more updates on this [...]" The media attention this received was not the organic result of some journalist noticing the preprint or the talk at TeVPA in Japan. There was a major wave of synchronized official press releases, coinciding with the TeVPA talk, from Berkeley National Lab[1], Brown University[2], SLAC[3], Brookhaven[4], Stanford[5], University of Sydney[6], and others including UMass Amherst and Imperial College London. Now, these institutions are all involved in the collaboration somehow, so it makes sense that they would coordinate press releases for a major result. The question is whether this result warrants such treatment. It's a single event at 2.6 sigma global significance. Promoting it in this way was a choice, and I'm pointing out that it seems quite possible - in fact I'd say extremely likely - that that choice was made with the funding situation top of mind. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf3aW0xTEEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf3aW0xTEEc [1] https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/09/01/lz-sees-surprising-result-in-search-for-dark-matter/ https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/09/01/lz-sees-surprising-res... [2] https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-09-01/lz-dark-matter-results https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-09-01/lz-dark-matter-results [3] https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2026-09-01-lz-sees-surprising-result-search-dark-matter https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2026-09-01-lz-sees-surpr... [4] https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=123133 https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=123133 [5] https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/09/dark-matter-detection-signal-lz https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/09/dark-matter-detect... [6] https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2026/09/03/lz-experiment-sees-surprising-result-in-search-for-dark-matter.html https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2026/09/03/lz-ex...

28d ago