A Large Underground Xenon (LUX) WIMP dark matter experiment

The LUX collaboration has proposed to build a few hundred kilogram dual phase Xenon WIMP dark matter detector at the 4850 foot level of the new SUSEL site in South Dakota. The design builds on the apparent scalability of the recent Xenon10 and Zeplin II experiments, which employed a similar technique. LUX will have an order of magnitude larger volume and introduce a new way to reduce the backgrounds from WIMP like nuclear recoil events, placing the whole detector inside an active water shield/neutron detector. I will briefly describe the design of the detector/shield concept, and summarize the implications for our sensitivity to WIMP dark matter.