Zusammenfassung
There is almost universal agreement among astronomers that most of the mass
in the Universe and most of the mass in the Galactic halo is dark. Many lines
of reasoning suggest that the dark matter consists of some new, as yet
undiscovered, weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP). There is now a vast
experimental effort being surmounted to detect WIMPS in the halo. The most
promising techniques involve direct detection in low-background laboratory
detectors and indirect detection through observation of energetic neutrinos
from annihilation of WIMPs that have accumulated in the Sun and/or the Earth.
Of the many WIMP candidates, perhaps the best motivated and certainly the most
theoretically developed is the neutralino, the lightest superpartner in many
supersymmetric theories. We review the minimal supersymmetric extension of the
Standard Model and discuss prospects for detection of neutralino dark matter.
We review in detail how to calculate the cosmological abundance of the
neutralino and the event rates for both direct- and indirect-detection schemes,
and we discuss astrophysical and laboratory constraints on supersymmetric
models. We isolate and clarify the uncertainties from particle physics, nuclear
physics, and astrophysics that enter at each step in the calculation. We
briefly review other related dark-matter candidates and detection techniques.
Nutzer