2:30 pm Monday, April 14, 2003
The dark matter candidates we are searching for, e.g. neutralinos, may be one of many components of the Cold Dark Matter. So the question is: if the candidates we are searching for constitute only a small fraction, say 1 percent or less, of the local dark matter halo, would these particles still be observable in the current and proposed direct and indirect dark matter searches? Originally we were led to consider such a question by claims of the need for collisional CDM as the main form of dark matter in the universe, but the question is valid independently of such claims. We could also reverse our question: if we see a CDM signal in any of our searches, could we be observing a subdominant component of the total CDM? How could we resolve the issue of which component of the total CDM we are observing? We will see that even very subdominant components of the CDM remains observable.