What's Next in the Hunt for Dark Matter?

This past July, the US Department of Energy and National Science Foundation announced which next-generation dark matter projects they'll be supporting.

Dark matter takes a lot of equipment, people, time, and creativity to detect. It also requires being in just the right conditions. For example, the XENON experiment is buried under Italy's Gran Sasso Mountain to eliminate any stray radiation from interfering with the detector.

The winning next-generation projects are

1. The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, which uses "a collection of hockey-puck-sized integrated circuits"to find Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs), a prominent dark matter candidate.
2. The LUX-Zeplin experiment, which can find WIMPs of a wide range of masses.
3. The next iteration of the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment, which uses magnetic fields to convert axions (another dark matter candidate) into photons.