Colloquia

The hunt for dark matter ... continues

Although direct and indirect searches for dark matter have yet to reveal any unambiguous detections of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), quite a few experiment have reported observations which have been interpreted as tantalizing hints of such a signal. In this colloquium, I will discuss why particle physicists think dark matter is likely to be made up of WIMPs, and how experiments are finally reaching the sensitivities needed to test the WIMP-hypothesis. If dark matter is, in fact, made up of WIMPs, then it seems likely to me that at least some of the observational hints are being generated by the interactions of such particles. If not, then over the next handful of years, experimentalists are going to make it increasingly difficult for theorists who want to build viable particle dark matter models.

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