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A new era in the search for dark matter

Nature volume 562, pages 51–56 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

There is a growing sense of ‘crisis’ in the dark-matter particle community, which arises from the absence of evidence for the most popular candidates for dark-matter particles—such as weakly interacting massive particles, axions and sterile neutrinos—despite the enormous effort that has gone into searching for these particles. Here we discuss what we have learned about the nature of dark matter from past experiments and the implications for planned dark-matter searches in the next decade. We argue that diversifying the experimental effort and incorporating astronomical surveys and gravitational-wave observations is our best hope of making progress on the dark-matter problem.

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Fig. 1: Possible solutions to the dark-matter problem.

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Acknowledgements

We thank V. Cardoso, D. Gaggero, D. Harvey, D. Hooper, B. Kavanagh, S. Vegetti and M. Viel for comments on the initial version of this manuscript. The work of T.M.P.T. is supported in part by NSF grant PHY-1316792.

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Nature thanks M. Kamionkowski and R. Massey for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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  1. GRAPPA Institute and Institute of Physics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gianfranco Bertone & Tim M. P. Tait

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Tim M. P. Tait

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G.B. conceived the idea of the review. G.B. and T.M.P.T. contributed equally to the writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Gianfranco Bertone or Tim M. P. Tait.

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Bertone, G., Tait, T.M.P. A new era in the search for dark matter. Nature 562, 51–56 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0542-z

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