Latest WIMP Prophecy
This bit of arm-waving is from a CERN Courier interview with the current rock-star physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed.
“ There is a funny perception, somewhat paralleling the absence of supersymmetry at the LHC, that the simple paradigm of WIMP dark matter has been ruled out by direct-detection experiments. Nope! In fact, the very simplest models of WIMP dark matter are perfectly alive and well. Once the electroweak quantum numbers of the dark-matter particles are specified, you can unambiguously compute what mass an electroweak charged dark-matter particle should have so that its thermal relic abundance is correct. You get a number between 1–3 TeV, far too heavy to be produced in any sizeable numbers at the LHC. Furthermore, they happen to have miniscule interaction cross sections for direct detection. So these very simplest theories of WIMP dark matter are inaccessible to the LHC and direct-detection experiments. But a 100 TeV collider has just enough juice to either see these particles, or rule out this simplest WIMP picture.”
This glosses over the fact that the LHC was at least partially promoted with the argument that it had a good chance of finding WIMPs.
Now we are told that the pot of WIMPs at the end of the rainbow is just over the next energy hill, or the next, or…
Are new paradigms of no interest?
Note: Prophesy (verb) is a valid word with meaning similar to prophecy (noun), but the latter is more recognizable.