In the first lecture, I will review the most recent cosmological evidence for the pervading dark matter in the universe and the emerging consensus that it is not ordinary matter.
We will then focus on thermal particle candidates, which may have been produced in the hot early universe and stayed around to constitute dark matter: neutrinos and Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). I will emphasize what can be learnt from cosmology (e.g. the evidence for cold dark matter and the limits on neutrino masses).
The third and the fourth lectures will be devoted the direct detection of WIMPs, its technical challenges and the present status. I will describe the recent advances from phonon-mediated detectors which currently provide the best limits and review the emerging technologies (liquid Xenon/Argon, low pressure TPC). We will also discuss the indirect detection of WIMPs.
Finally, in the fifth lecture, after a review the searches for non-thermal candidates (axions, WIMPZILLAs etc.), I will discuss the unnaturalness of our current parametrization of the universe in terms of neutrinos, baryons, dark matter and dark energy. Is this real or a manifestation of an incomplete understanding of gravity? I will explore current ideas to provide experimental information to support such a line of enquiry (e.g., tests for large additional dimensions)
