These peripheral interactions are overwhelmingly likely to be from external gamma rays or neutrons and radioactive decays of trace radionuclides in the detector components composing the TPC and cryostats.

Next, the TPC is located inside several layers of active and passive shielding to reduce rates of external gamma rays and neutrons.

These energy deposits are accompanied by emission of optical photons, which can be detected by an array of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) located outside of the acrylic tanks.

Together, the water tank and liquid scintillator also provide significant passive shielding against external gamma rays and neutrons, stopping a vast majority of them before they have the chance to enter the TPC.

All together these different strategies ensure that LZ is a detector capable of performing a very sensitive search for dark matter scatters on xenon nuclei.

This causes the xenon atom to ricochet around the area near the site of the scatter, converting its energy into the production of prompt scintillation photons, freed (ionization) electrons, and heat.

The externally-created electric fields are created by a set of four high voltage electrode grids: the bottom, the cathode, the gate, and the anode.

Because the S2 happens very close to the upper PMT array, it alone can give a good sense of where in XY (i.e. relative to the detector axis) the interaction has occurred.

Note that unlike other kinds of time projection chambers, such as those used in neutrino experiments like MicroBooNE, the ionization signal here is fully captured via the S2 light - no current is directly measured by electrodes.

In July 2022, the LZ collaboration published in a preprint its first upper limit on the spin-independent WIMP-nucleon scattering cross section, using approximately 60 live days worth of data.

On 28 July 2023, the LZ experiment's first results of its searches for WIMPs, previously released as a preprint, were published in Physical Review Letters,[12] excluding cross sections above 9.2×10−48 cm2 at 36 GeV with 90% confidence level,[13] jointly on the same date XENONnT published its first results too excluding cross sections above 2.58×10−47 cm2 at 28 GeV with 90% confidence level.