Abstract

Since several decades we know that most of the matter in the Universe does not consist of the ordinary atoms that we all know. For every gram of ordinary matter there is about five grams of an as yet unknown substance that we call Dark Matter. In this talk I will describe the astrophysical evidence that makes us believe that Dark Matter exists. Then I will focus on the strategies that we employ to discover new elementary particles that could be Dark Matter.

Especially the next few years are an exiting time for Dark Matter hunters, since a new generation of experiments will be constructed that aim at a first ever detection of the Dark Matter particle. The most promising of the new generation detectors are dual phase xenon time projection chambers: the XENON100 detector currently approaching the end of its lifetime, the LUX detector that started last year, and the XENON1T detector that will become operational in 2015.