LHC restart and new underground experiment may be last chance for WIMPs

Nature : Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are one explanation for the composition of dark matter, the invisible material that makes up 85% of the universe’s mass. However, in the past few years several experiments have failed to detect any WIMPs. Although the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN was thought capable of creating the particles during its previous run at 8 TeV, it did not. The most sensitive direct detection experiment yet, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) project, also failed to find any candidate events during its first run in 2013. It’s possible that the existence of WIMPs could be ruled out soon if neither the LHC, with an upgraded target collision energy of 14 TeV, nor XENON1T, a direct detection experiment 50 times as sensitive as LUX, finds any. If so, that would open the door to other possible dark-matter explanations that had been considered more “exotic” than WIMPs.