What is the Cosmological Significance of a Discovery of Wimps at Colliders or in Direct Experiments?

Abstract

Although a discovery of wimps either at colliders or in direct experiments would have enormous implications for our understanding of particle physics, it would imply less than one would like about our understanding of the dark matter in the universe or in the galactic halo: it surely is possible that the discovered particles account for only a little of the total dark matter. To establish the cosmological significance of a wimp discovery, their density must be determined. We show that data from neither hadron colliders nor direct detection experiments alone can be sufficient to determine the local or relic density of discovered wimps, even allowing all needed assumptions about cosmology and astrophysics. We provide examples of dark matter models where nearly identical detector or collider signals correspond to very different densities. We show, however, that it may be possible to determine the density of wimps by combining data from both experiments; we present a general method to do this in the case of supersymmetric dark matter, and describe how similar studies could be made for other wimp candidates.