Astrophysical search strategies for accelerator blind dark matter

Abstract

A weakly interacting dark-matter particle may be difficult to discover at an accelerator because it either (1) is too massive, (2) has no standard-model gauge interactions, or (3) is almost degenerate with other states. In each of these cases, searches for annihilation products in the Galactic halo are useful probes of dark-matter properties. Using the example of supersymmetric dark matter, I discuss how astrophysical searches for dark matter may provide discovery and mass information inaccessible to collider physics programs such as the Tevatron and LHC.