The Dark Matters at ICRC 2025

TL;DR

The ICRC 2025 dark matter track highlights a transition to neutrino-limited direct detection, the rise of multimessenger indirect searches, and increased focus on non-WIMP candidates, emphasizing new detectors and shared data frameworks.

Contribution

This paper summarizes the key experimental and conceptual shifts in dark matter research presented at ICRC 2025, emphasizing the evolving landscape and future directions.

Findings

Direct detection limited by solar neutrinos.

Multimessenger approaches are now central to indirect searches.

Non-WIMP candidates are gaining prominence.

Abstract

The dark matter track at ICRC~2025 showed a field in transition. Direct detection has entered the \emph{neutrino-floor era}, with XENONnT and PandaX-4T now limited by Solar neutrinos. Indirect searches have become truly \emph{multimessenger}, combining $\gamma$-rays, neutrinos, cosmic rays, and radio data under unified likelihoods and shared systematics. Non-WIMP candidates -- axions, sub-GeV particles, primordial black holes, macroscopic relics -- are becoming central. Across all fronts, progress depends as much on new detectors as on the coherence of shared data, methods, and analysis frameworks. Here, I distill the main experimental and conceptual shifts behind these trends, noting how assumptions have evolved since ICRC~2023 and where the next decisive advances are likely to come.