indirect detection efforts which attempt to observe the annihilation products of dark matter particles.

The role played by direct detection is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, although collider experiments may be capable of detecting dark matter particles, they will not be able to distinguish a cosmologically stable WIMP from a long-lived but unstable particle. More generally speaking, colliders will not inform us as to the cosmological abundance of a WIMP they might observe. Furthermore, while the mass of the dark matter particle could potentially be measured by a collider experiment such as the LHC, its couplings are much more difficult to access in this way. Direct detection experiments, in contrast, provide a valuable probe of the dark matter’s couplings to the Standard Model. Finally, the uncertainties involved in direct detection are likely to be significantly smaller than in most indirect detection channels. Whereas indirect detection rates rely critically on the distribution of dark matter, especially in high density regions, and on other astrophysical properties such as the galactic magnetic and radiation fields, direct detection experiments rely only on the local dark matter density and velocity distribution.

The density of dark matter in the local neighborhood is inferred by 