We’ve reached the “Neutrino Fog”

We are thrilled to announce that our paper, “First Search for Light Dark Matter in the Neutrino Fog with XENONnT,” has been chosen as a Physical Review Letters (PRL) Selection of the Year! 🏆

This marks the second consecutive year that the XENON collaboration has received this prestigious recognition.

What is the “Fog”? To hunt for Dark Matter, we go 1400m underground at INFN-LNGS in Italy to escape the “noise” of the surface. But we’ve reached a new frontier: our detector is now so sensitive that we are picking up a “glare” of neutrinos coming directly from the core of the Sun.

This is the Neutrino Fog. These tiny particles (Boron-8 neutrinos) create signals that mimic the light WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) we are searching for.

Why it matters:

Even though the fog is thick, our team developed innovative ways to peer through it. By lowering our energy threshold, we’ve set world-leading limits, proving that XENONnT is at the absolute limit of what is physically possible.

Finding Dark Matter means learning how to navigate the fog. We’re just getting started. 🇮🇹🔬

Paper: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.111802
Collection: https://promo.aps.org/prl2025