WIMP and Axion Dark Matter

Abstract

There is almost universal agreement among cosmologists that most of the matter in the Universe is dark, and there are very good reasons to believe that most of this dark matter must be nonbaryonic. The two leading candidates for this dark matter are axions and weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs), such as the neutralino in supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. I discuss the arguments for these two dark-matter candidates and review techniques for discovery of these dark-matter particles.