Dark Matter Experimental Overview

Dark Matter is one of the most intriguing riddles of modern astrophysics. The Standard Cosmological Model implies that only 4.5% of the mass-energy of the Universe is baryonic matter and the remaining 95% is unknown. Of this remainder, 22% is expected to be Dark Matter - an entity that behaves like ordinary matter gravitationally but has not been yet observed in particle physics experiments and is not foreseen by the Standard Particle Model. It is expected that Dark Matter can be found in halos surrounding galaxies, the Milky Way among them, and it is hypothesized that it exists in the form of massive, weakly interacting particles i.e. WIMPs. A large experimental effort is being conducted to discover these elusive particles either directly, in underground laboratories, or indirectly, using experiments which search for decay or annihilation products of such particles in the night sky. This document aims to give a review of the status and recent results of selected Dark Matter searches.

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