matter within the range measured by WMAP ($0.095 < \Omega h^2 <
0.129$) [@wmap], the thermally averaged annihilation cross section is required to be $\sigv \approx 3 \times 10^{-26}$ cm$^3$/s (or alternatively, $\sigv \approx
0.9$ pb). Remarkably, this is quite similar to the value obtained for a generic electroweak mass particle annihilating through the exchange of the electroweak gauge or Higgs bosons. In particular, we notice that $\VEV{\sigma v} = \pi
\alpha^2/8m^2$ leads us to a WIMP mass on the order of $m \sim 100$ GeV.

We conclude that if a stable, weakly interacting, electroweak-scale particle exists, then it is likely to be present in the universe today with an abundance similar to the measured dark matter density. With this in mind, we focus our dark matter search strategy on this particularly well motivated scenario in which the dark matter particle has electroweak interactions and a mass near the electroweak scale.

DIRECT DETECTION {#sec:section5}
================

Experiments such as XENON [@xenon], CDMS [@cdmssi; @cdmssd], ZEPLIN [@zeplin], Edelweiss [@edelweiss], CRESST [@cresst], WARP [@warp] and COUPP [@coupp] are designed to detect dark matter particles through their elastic scattering with nuclei. This class of techniques is collectively known as direct detection, in contrast to 