Session CA - Elementary Particles II.
INVITED session, Friday morning, November 15
Mary Gay D, Holiday Inn
\indent There is broad agreement among the astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology communities that most of the mass in galactic halos and, in fact, the universe is dark. Popular candidates for dark matter are: heavy Dirac neutrinos, light neutrinos, non-standard coupled weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), axions, and the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). Large Scale Structure Models that are consistent with the observed fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation require a mixture of \ 70% cold dark matter (CDM), with a Maxwellian distribution having a dispersion velocity of \ 270 km/sec in our galactic halo, and 25% hot dark matter (HDM), and a small component of baryonic dark matter. The early attempts to directly detect dark matter in 1986 have resulted in a large number of serious experimental efforts that have already led to interesting bounds on the masses and coupling constants of such hypothetical particles. A broad overview of these experimental programs will be given. A status report will emphasize those experiments that have already produced results sensitive enough to have had an impact on cosmological models. \end abstract \enddocument