Dark matter has an enigmatic invisible existence contributing most of the gravity in the universe. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are favored as particle candidates for non-baryonic cold dark matter, since their interaction strength can explain the thermal relic abundance of dark matter. Recent event excesses or annual modulation signals reported by direct detection experiments su...

Leading postulations in supersymmetry indicate that the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) accounts for the bulk of mass observed as dark matter in the Universe. Cryogenic liquid noble detectors are expected to discover these particles within the next two years. This experiment investigates the limits of detectors designed around the XENON10 prototype in determination of WIMP mass and i...

Exclusion Limits on the WIMP-Nucleon Elastic-Scattering Cross Section from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search by Sunil Ramanlal Golwala Doctor of Philosophy in Physics University of California at Berkeley Professor Bernard Sadoulet, Chair Extensive evidence indicates that a large fraction of the matter in the universe is nonluminous, nonbaryonic, and “cold” — nonrelativistic at the time matter be...