SPECIAL HEP SEMINAR | Neutralino Dark Matter: Lessons from the LHC for Direct and Indirect Detection Searches

I will review the observational status of neutralino dark matter and investigate the prospects for detection in current and future experiments. The talk will be divided in two parts. The first part will be dedicated to some minimal SUSY models defined at the scale of Grand Unification. I will show that the discovery of the Higgs boson provides in these cases specific hints on the nature and detection prospects of the dark matter particle, whose mass is in the TeV range, and whose scattering cross section will be exhaustively probed by tonne-scale underground detectors. In the second part I will cover the general case of the phenomenological MSSM, showing that the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), whose construction start is planned for 2016, will provide a highly sensitive way of searching for dark matter that will be partially overlapping and partially complementary with tonne-scale detectors and collider searches. CTA is thus instrumental to effectively explore the nearly full parameter space of the MSSM.