Dark Matter Experimental Overview

Abstract

Dark Matter is one of the most intriguing riddles of modern astrophysics. The Standard Cosmological Model implies that only 4.5% of the mass-energy of the Universe is baryonic matter and the remaining 95% is unknown. Of this remainder, 22% is expected to be Dark Matter - an entity that behaves like ordinary matter gravitationally but has not been yet observed in particle physics experiments and is not foreseen by the Standard Particle Model. It is expected that Dark Matter can be found in halos surrounding galaxies, the Milky Way among them, and it is hypothesized that it exists in the form of massive, weakly interacting particles i.e. WIMPs. A large experimental effort is being conducted to discover these elusive particles either directly, in underground laboratories, or indirectly, using experiments which search for decay or annihilation products of such particles in the night sky. This document aims to give a review of the status and recent results of selected Dark Matter searches.

23 pages, 10 figures, Presented at the Cracow Epiphany Conference on Physics in Underground Laboratories and Its Connection with LHC, Cracow, Poland, January 5-8, 2010

References in corpus (7)

• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Interpretation
• Observation of an anomalous positron abundance in the cosmic radiation
• Results from a Search for Light-Mass Dark Matter with a P-type Point Contact Germanium Detector
• A new measurement of the antiproton-to-proton flux ratio up to 100 GeV in the cosmic radiation
• First results from a Dark Matter search with liquid Argon at 87 K in the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory
• Commissioning Run of the CRESST-II Dark Matter Search
• Catching a bullet: direct evidence for the existence of dark matter