The Net Advance of Physics: The Nature of Dark Matter, by Kim Griest -- Section 6A.
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Why is it important to actually search for and to identify the dark
matter? Of course it is intrinsically interesting to know what the
primary constituent of the Universe consists of, but also until we
know the dark matter identity, there will always be the doubt that
there is no dark matter, and instead there is some flaw in our
knowledge of fundamental physics.
Unfortunately, no one technique is useful for all the different
candidates. The only way to proceed is to pick a candidate and
design an experiment specific to that candidate. This is risky
proposition, especially for the experimentalist who must spend
many years of his or her life developing the technology and
performing the search. For this reason, only the best motivated
candidates are currently being searched for. There are hundreds of
other dark matter candidates that we have not discussed at all. As
one goes down the list of popular candidates, asking oneself which
candidate is the most likely, I have to admit that
``none-of-the-above" comes to mind. However, it is difficult to
make any progress searching for an unspecified candidate. After
``none-of-the-above", I think the Wimp candidates, and especially
the supersymmetric neutralino candidate, is probably the best bet. It
may sound odd, especially to astronomers, that my best guess for the
dark matter is a specific undiscovered elementary particle based on
a theory for which there is no evidence, so I will spend some time
describing my somewhat idiosyncratic reasons.
Please see the lectures by A. Masiero [68] for
additional in depth
discussion of many of the issues covered here.
Also see the new
Physics Report ``Supersymmetric Dark Matter", by
Jungman,
Kamionkowski, and myself [22] for more details on everything
covered here.
Search for Wimp Dark Matter (Neutralinos)
BIBLIOGRAPHY