The nature of dark matter

I don't regularly read New Scientist, but the article titled "It's crunch time for dark matter if WIMPs don't show" attracted my interest.

My original interest in dark matter as an active researcher began 4 years ago. At that time I had just heard about an experiment searching for dark photons at Jefferson Laboratory. After visiting two workshops/meetings where dark matter was a topic of discussion, I began activity with the IceCube dark matter working group. Dark matter is interesting because it is the most obvious experimental evidence of new physics (physics that wasn't understood before my lifetime) and so is significant.

Since the time I became interested in dark matter as a researcher, I have been mostly interested in dark matter which wasn't the simplest candidate that theorists could invent (basically, the WIMP). Why should we expect all of the universe that we haven't been able to investigate to have some extreme simple phenomenology while the universe that we can investigate displays such rich behaviour?

The main reason why WIMPs are becoming less interesting is that we have failed to find new particles at the LHC. That is because one of the main motivations for WIMPs is that they were in the best motivated supersymmetry models, which are losing their lustre with each new collision at the LHC.

What we are seeing now is that the former paradigm (which existed without direct experimental evidence), that of supersymmetry and WIMPs, is ending. It will be interesting being an active researcher as a new paradigm is formed.

I personally favour theories with a rich dark sector. For many of these, our experiments just are not sensitive. On the other hand, as an experimentalist, what I am interested in is theories which predict some new signature that can be looked for in an experiment. Even if it is a long shot.

New Scientist article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229712.600-its-crunch-time-for-dark-matter-if-wimps-dont-show.html

Dark matter with rich phenomenology (example):
http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0753