The majority of the matter in the universe is still unidentified and under investigation by both direct and indirect means. Many experiments searching for the recoil of dark-matter particles off target nuclei in underground laboratories have establis
hed increasingly strong constraints on the mass and scattering cross sections of weakly interacting particles, and some have even seen hints at a possible signal. Other experiments search for a possible mixing of photons with light scalar or pseudo-scalar particles that could also constitute dark matter. Furthermore, annihilation or decay of dark matter can contribute to charged cosmic rays, photons at all energies, and neutrinos. Many existing and future ground-based and satellite experiments are sensitive to such signals. Finally, data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are scrutinized for missing energy as a signature of new weakly interacting particles that may be related to dark matter. In this review article we summarize the status of the field with an emphasis on the complementarity between direct detection in dedicated laboratory experiments, indirect detection in the cosmic radiation, and searches at particle accelerators.
We describe in detail our calculation of the full supersymmetric (SUSY) QCD corrections to neutralino annihilation into heavy quarks and extend our numerical analysis of the resulting dark matter relic density to scenarios without scalar or gaugino m
ass unification. In these scenarios, the final state is often composed of top quarks and the annihilation proceeds through Z^0-boson or scalar top-quark exchanges. The impact of the corrections is again shown to be sizable, so that they must be taken into account systematically in global analyses of the supersymmetry parameter space.
