I get something of the other of 1,000 WIMPS (those are a kind of DM particle) per cubic meter ... snip ... So there are of order 100 million WIMPS per second passing through your body.
What sol left out of his description is the word "hypothetical" and the fact that a bunch of expensive experiments have been (and are still) trying to find these *hypothetical* DM particles without success.
According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP "Indirect detection efforts rest upon the theoretical prediction that halo WIMPs may, as they pass through the Sun, interact with solar protons and helium nuclei. Such an interaction would cause a WIMP to lose energy and become "captured" by the Sun (see Solar WIMP capture). As more and more WIMPs thermalize inside the Sun, they begin to annihilate with each other, forming a variety of particles including high-energy neutrinos. These neutrinos may then travel to the Earth to be detected in one of the many neutrino telescopes, such as the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan. The number of neutrino events detected per day at these detectors depends upon the properties of the WIMP, as well as on the mass of the Higgs boson. Similar experiments are underway to detect neutrinos from WIMP annihilations within the Earth and from within the galactic center."
BUT, it looks like the Super-Kamiodande experiment found no evidence of WIMPS at least at energies greater than 1500 GeV.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0711/0711.0053v1.pdf "November 2007 ... snip ... 8.1 WIMP searches. We have performed searches for WIMP annihilations in the center of the Earth, Sun and Galactic Center using upward through-going muons [7]. Here we repeat the same search using upward showering muons. ... snip ... Since, there is no statistically significant excess in any of the search cones, we do not see any evidence for WIMP-induced upward showering muons in our dataset."
Now I know that the DAMA group had claimed discovery, but CDMS and EDELWEISS results apparently ruled that claim out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP " DAMA collaboration has claimed a positive detection. Other groups, however, have not confirmed this result. The CDMS and EDELWEISS experiments would be expected to observe a significant number of WIMP-nucleus scatters if the DAMA signal were in fact caused by WIMPs. Since the other experiments do not see these events, the interpretation of the DAMA result as a WIMP detection can be excluded for most WIMP models. It is possible to devise models that reconcile a positive DAMA result with the other negative results, but as the sensitivity of other experiments improves, this becomes more difficult. The CDMS data taken in the Soudan Mine and made public in May of 2004 exclude the entire DAMA signal region given certain standard assumptions about the properties of the WIMPs and the dark matter halo."
In fact, I know of no experiment at this time that has definitively, probably or even possibly proven that WIMPS exist. Yet, you post as if we know for certain that they do. We do not. At present, they are nothing more than a hypothetical gnome that I think you pray will solve your missing matter problem. Now if the LHC finds evidence of WIMPS, you ping me. And if it doesn't, I'll ping you.
By the way, I found this more complete 2002 list titled "dark matter experiments - by site" that our readers might be interested in seeing (to contrast with claims about the search for DM being "cheap"):
http://gaitskell.brown.edu/physics/talks/0207_NFAC_ReviewCommittee/Gaitskell_DM_NFAC_Redux.pdf . It lists IGEX, ORPHEUS, NaI, NaIAD, ZEPLIN I, ZEPLIN II/III, ZEPLIN-MAX, DRIFT-I, DRIFT-10, COSME, IGEX, ANAIS, ROSEBUD, Saclay-NaI, EDELWEISS I, EDELWEISS II, Hdlberg/Mscw, HDMS, Genius, DAMA, LIBRA, Xenon, CRESST-I, CRESST-II, CUORICINO, CUORE, XMAS, Elegants V, Elegants VI, LiF, SIMPLE, CDMS-1, CDMS-II, CryoArray, XENON and PICASSO. And I'm sure some newer (and probably even more expensive) ones have been dreamed up since then. The search for DM is not "cheap", either.
