Explaining the results from a new search for dark matter at high recoil energies with the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter search experiment, a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber operating at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, USA, has demonstrated the world's leading sensitivity to searches for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). LZ's exceptional sensitivity enables searches for dark matter that produce high-energy (O(100) keV) nuclear recoils, a region where LZ's modelled backgrounds produce much less than one event in the collected exposure. Through a model-agnostic non-relativistic effective field theory (NR-EFT) framework, signals airising from vector, axial, and dipole WIMP-nucleon couplings are probed. This talk will cover the results of the most recent LZ NR-EFT analysis of data from 2.84 tonne-years exposure covering the nuclear recoil energy range up to 270 keV, where a candidate event was observed.