Dark matter searches

Understand

One of the major challenges of modern physics is to decipher the nature of dark matter.

• Astrophysical observations provide ample evidence for the existence of an invisible and dominant mass component in the observable universe, from the scales of galaxies up to the largest cosmological scales.
• The dark matter could be made of new, yet undiscovered elementary particles, with allowed masses and interaction strengths with normal matter spanning an enormous range.
• Axions, produced non-thermally in the early universe, and weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which froze out of thermal equilibrium with a relic density matching the observations, represent two well-motivated, generic classes of dark matter candidates.