Reflections on the search for particle dark matter by direct experiments

Abstract

Since the daring intuition by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 about the existence of dark matter in the Universe, in spite of the extensive investigations pursued over a very long lapse of time, the nature of this matter and of its (other than gravitational, if any) interactions have remained unknown. Very likely, at least a fraction of this matter consists of fossil particles; a possibility that in the last decades has prompted direct and indirect searches for these relics. Particular attention has been (and is being) devoted to the investigation about the physical effects that fossil particles, and in particular Weakly Interacting Particles (WIMPs), moving in our galaxy can produce when they scatter off the material of an appropriate underground detector. In this note we consider the present status of this type of experimental investigation, and comment about some important results obtained recently by the DAMA Collaboration and their possible developments.

References in corpus (9)

• First results from the CRESST-III low-mass dark matter program
• Constraining the Spin-Dependent WIMP-Nucleon Cross Sections with XENON1T
• Results of a Search for Sub-GeV Dark Matter Using 2013 LUX Data
• Initial Performance of the COSINE-100 Experiment
• First results on dark matter annual modulation from ANAIS-112 experiment
• XENON1T Dark Matter Data Analysis: Signal & Background Models, and Statistical Inference
• Using the Energy Spectrum at DAMA/LIBRA to Probe Light Dark Matter
• Discussing direct search of dark matter particles in the Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model with light neutralinos
• Model-independent comparison of annual modulation and total rate with direct detection experiments