For three days last week, more than 100 physicists took over the University of Maryland student center, which had been left abandoned by spring breakers. The topic at hand: rethinking the future of dark-matter searches.
The workshop, titled US Cosmic Visions: New Ideas in Dark Matter, represented a recalibration for the dark-matter community. For decades physicists have been fixated on the WIMP, a particle with a mass–energy in the GeV range and a tendency to intermittently mingle with ordinary matter via the weak force. Theorists weaved WIMPs—weakly interacting massive particles—into elegant supersymmetric models. Experimentalists built vast, exquisitely sensitive underground detectors to nab the occasional extroverted WIMP amid the constant deluge that’s thought to stealthily pass through the planet.
But at least for the physicists at the workshop, the era of hoping for a WIMP miracle is all but over. Cutting-edge experiments such as XENON in Italy and LUX in South Dakota have so far come up empty in their searches. Researchers have failed to spot signs of missing energy at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider that would flag the existence of a WIMP or a related supersymmetric particle.
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