Hunting the ghost in our Universe - the quest for particle dark matter
Michael Schmidt (Sydney University)

Particle dark matter is the simplest explanation for the missing mass in our Universe. I will focus on weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) which are theoretically well motivated. Despite tremendous experimental effort, so far there is no solid evidence in (in)direct detection experiments or at the LHC. This indicates that the scattering cross section of dark matter with Standard Model particles may be smaller than naively assumed. I will discuss two aspects related to this: (i) the possibility that dark matter does not directly couple to quarks and consequently direct detection only occurs at loop level; (ii) regions of parameter space, which are naively ruled out, because dark matter is overabundant, may be allowed if there is a phase in the early Universe during which dark matter is unstable.