Speaker
Description
Direct dark matter experiments attempt to find evidence of the existence of the so-far unknown particles hypothesised to make up the invisible-matter component of the universe. The main focus is on WIMP-type particles, as they remain theoretically well-motivated and the scattering of galactic WIMPs in a terrestrial detector could create an observable signal. Over the past decade, these experiments have pushed sensitivity to WIMP interactions with ordinary matter across many orders of magnitude in both particle mass and cross-section, using a diverse range of target materials and detection techniques. Tonne-scale liquid-xenon detectors currently provide the strongest sensitivity to heavy WIMPs and have, in the last few years, ruled out a large number of theoretical models, while complementary approaches extend coverage to non-standard interaction types and lighter mass particles.
As these experiments advance, they are also entering a regime in which rare neutrino interactions become observable, and might soon become the dominant background to dark matter searches, linking direct detection increasingly closely to neutrino and multi-messenger astroparticle physics. This summary will review the main detection techniques, recent progress, and future directions in the field, with emphasis on the continuing search for WIMP dark matter over a wide mass range, the complementarity of different experimental approaches, and the growing role of neutrino signals and backgrounds in shaping the next generation of experiments.
