Daniel Akerib
Case Western University
Looking for WIMPs in the Galactic Halo: the Cryogenic Dark Matter
Search (and some other dark matter experiments)


Overwhelming observational evidence indicates that most of the matter in the Universe may consist of non-baryonic dark matter. One possibility is that the dark matter consists of relic Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that were produced in the early Universe and are now a major component of the Milky Way's dark halo. After reviewing some of the evidence for dark matter and describing the WIMP hypothesis, I will describe the search we are conducting to detect these particles, which may be of supersymmetric origin, using phonon-mediated particle detectors housed in a low-radioactive 20-milli-Kelvin environment 2000-feet below ground. I will also describe some of the other experiments that are part of the broad world-wide program of WIMP detection.