The proposal “WIMPs Kairos – The Moment of Truth for WIMP dark matter” has been placed in the priority list by a panel of experts of the European Research Council, and it will be funded under the “ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant” scheme. The scope of this line of research is described in the proposal’s incipit:
Identifying Dark Matter is a top priority in Particle Physics and Cosmology: we know it contributes 85% of all the matter in the Universe, and we know that it cannot be made of ordinary baryonic matter. What is it then? Among Dark Matter candidates, WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) occupy a special place, since they naturally arise from well motivated extensions of the standard model of particle physics, therefore providing an elegant explanation to the Dark Matter problem. With the advent of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and of a new generation of astroparticle experiments, the moment of truth has come for WIMPs, for we will either discover them in the next 5 to 10 years, or we will inevitably witness the decline of the WIMP paradigm.