Candidates for non-baryonic dark matter

Abstract

This report is a brief review of the efforts to explain the nature of non-baryonic dark matter and of the studies devoted to the search for relic particles. Among the different dark matter candidates, special attention is devoted to relic neutralinos, by giving an overview of the recent calculations of its relic abundance and detection rates in a wide variety of supersymmetric schemes.

Comments: 13 pages, 10 figures, typeset with ReVTeX, uses espcrc2.sty. Invited review talk presented at "Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP 2001)" Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Italy, September 8-12, 2001. References added. The paper may also be downloaded from http://www.to.infn.it/~fornengo/proceedings/taup01.ps.gz