WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) WIMPs, by
definition, interact only very weakly and are expected to have a
mass of between 10 and 1000 GeV. The only detectable interaction
that WIMPs may undergo with `normal' matter is scattering and
this is what dark matter detectors try to observe via different
processes. WIMPs come from the theory of supersymmetry and there
are several reasonable possibilities. It is understood that the
dark matter WIMP must be the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle
(LSP), which is stable. The four main LSP contenders are the
sneutrino, the gravitino, the axino and the neutralino. The
sneutrino is the SUSY boson partner of the neutrino and is
expected to have a mass in the range 55.0 GeV - 2.3 TeV.
Unfortunately the sneutrino is ruled out as the dominant dark
matter component by direct galactic dark matter searches, which
have probed the sneutrino-nucleon cross-section region and have
not observed these particles. The gravitino is the spin-3/2
fermion SUSY partner to the, as yet