Monthly Archives: November 2010

The moment of Truth for WIMP Dark Matter

The most promising candidates for the mysterious Dark Matter are new particles called WIMPs (for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). In a recent article published on Nature, I argue that the moment of truth has come for these particles, for we will either discover them, or we will inevitably witness the decline of the ‘WIMP paradigm’.

Here is the abstract of the version posted on the arXiv.
We know that dark matter constitutes 85% of all the matter in the Universe, but we do not know of what it is made. Amongst the many Dark Matter candidates proposed, WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) occupy a special place, as they arise naturally from well motivated extensions of the standard model of particle physics. With the advent of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and a new generation of astroparticle experiments, the moment of truth has come for WIMPs: either we will discover them in the next five to ten years, or we will witness the inevitable decline of WIMP paradigm.