SUSY Dark Matter and LZ High-Recoil Event

by Prof. Jin Min Yang (杨金民) (Henan Normal University & ITP-CAS)

Thursday 12 Nov 2026, 11:00 → 12:00 Asia/Shanghai

Tsung-Dao Lee Institute/N6F-N600 - Lecture Room (Tsung-Dao Lee Institute)

Abstract:

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment recently extended its nuclear-recoil search window to approximately 270 keV using an exposure of 2.84 tonne-years. It observed one event consistent with a nuclear recoil of 248±23 (stat) ±23 (sys) keV in a region of low expected background. The background-only hypothesis has a global significance of 2.6σ after the look-elsewhere effect, with a maximum local significance of 3.4σ among the interaction models tested. LZ examined rare background processes and detector effects but identified none as a likely explanation of the event. Its unusually high recoil energy opens a qualitatively new window for dark-matter interactions whose signals are suppressed at low recoil energy and enhanced at large momentum transfer. This event has prompted interpretations in various dark matter models, among which the most fascinating one is supersymmetry (SUSY).

In this talk I will first give a brief review of SUSY and the dark matter in different SUSY models including the minimal SUSY model (MSSM), the next-to-minimal SUSY model (NMSSM), and the NMSSM with the inverse seesaw (ISS) for neutrino masses (ISS-NMSSM). Then I will present the inelastic SUSY dark matter explanations for the LZ event in these models, i.e., the higgsino dark matter in the MSSM, the singlino dark matter in the NMSSM, and the sneutrino dark matter in the ISS-NMSSM. Finally, I will discuss how to test such a SUSY scenario with the TeV lightest sparticle dark matter at the HL-LHC.

Speaker Bio:

Jin Min Yang received his PhD from the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Academia Sinica in 1995. From 1996 to 1998, he was a researcher at Northwestern University and Iowa State University, USA. From 1998 to 2000, he was a JSPS postdoc at Tohoku University, Japan.

In 2000, he joined the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Academia Sinica, as a full professor. In 2024, he joined Henan Normal University as a PI professor. He has been working in high energy physics phenomenology, focusing on new physics beyond the Standard Model, especially low-energy supersymmetry, dark matter, Higgs physics, and particle cosmology.

Alternative online link: https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/hVYau0ZAmYW8
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