Strategies for Determining the Nature of Dark Matter

TL;DR

This review examines various experimental strategies, including direct, indirect, and collider searches, to identify the particle nature of dark matter, emphasizing their complementary roles in understanding its properties.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current and developing search techniques for electroweak scale dark matter particles, highlighting their potential to collectively determine dark matter's nature.

Findings

Multiple detection methods offer complementary information.

Current experiments are probing a wide range of dark matter properties.

Integrated approaches increase chances of conclusive identification.

Abstract

In this review, we discuss the role of the various experimental programs taking part in the broader effort to identify the particle nature of dark matter. In particular, we focus on electroweak scale dark matter particles and discuss a wide range of search strategies being carried out and developed to detect them. These efforts include direct detection experiments, which attempt to observe the elastic scattering of dark matter particles with nuclei, indirect detection experiments, which search for photons, antimatter and neutrinos produced as a result of dark matter annihilations, and collider searches for new TeV-scale physics. Each of these techniques could potentially provide a different and complementary set of information related to the mass, interactions and distribution of dark matter. Ultimately, it is hoped that these many different tools will be used together to conclusively identify the particle or particles that constitute the dark matter of our universe.