Narrow Results

It is now well established and accepted that roughly 25% of the total mass-energy density of the Universe is in the form of non-relativistic particles. That these particles, referred to as Dark Matter, have remained a mystery has served as motivation for the design and implementation of increasingly ingenious and far reaching experiments in an attempt to identify and understand them. This paper will review various ongoing Dark Matter searches with focus on the variety of techniques and implementation used to both detect the rare Dark Matter interactions as well as reject the vast number of background events.

Direct detection of WIMPs is key to understand the origin and composition of Dark Matter. Among the many experimental techniques available, those providing directional information have the potential of yielding an unambiguous observation of WIMPs even in the presence of insidious backgrounds. A measurement of the distribution of arrival direction of WIMPs can also discriminate between Galactic Dark Matter halo models. Here, we will discuss the motivation for directional detectors and review the experimental techniques used by the various experiments. We will then describe the DMTPC detector in more detail.

In this article I review model-independent procedures for extracting properties of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) from direct Dark Matter detection experiments. Neither prior knowledge about the velocity distribution function of halo Dark Matter particles nor about their mass or cross sections on target nucleus is needed. The unique required information is measured recoil energies from experiments with different detector materials.

It was recently proposed that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) may provide new ways of generating the observed baryon asymmetry in the early universe, as well as addressing the cosmic coincidence between dark matter (DM) and baryon abundances. This suggests a new possible connection between weak scale new particle physics and modern cosmology. This review summarizes the general ideas and simple model examples of the two recently proposed WIMP baryogenesis mechanisms: baryogenesis from WIMP DM annihilation during thermal freeze-out, and baryogenesis from metastable WIMP decay after thermal freeze-out. This review also discusses the interesting phenomenology of these models, in particular, the experimental signals that can be probed in the intensity frontier experiments and the large hadron collider (LHC) experiments.