Bias mitigation for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experimen

LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a dark matter experiment located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota. LZ is exploring new regimes of experimental sensitivity to a variety of dark matter candidates, mainly the Weakly Interacting Massive particles (WIMPs), the most promising candidate. In pursuing new physics, it is important to mitigate human biases towards achieving a preferred outcome. Many techniques for avoiding biases have been developed over the years, such as blinding and using hidden parameters. LZ uses a method called salting, in which signal-like events are injected into our data stream and removed only after the data analysis is complete.