Weakly interacting massive particle
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are hypothetical particles that are one of the proposed candidates for dark matter. These particles would have mass and would interact with gravity, would have been created in abundance during the Big Bang, and would since have reduced in number because of self-annihilation caused by their weak interaction.
There exists no formal definition of a WIMP, but broadly, it is an elementary particle which interacts via gravity and any other force (or forces) which is as weak as or weaker than the weak nuclear force, but also non-vanishing in strength. Many WIMP candidates are expected to have been produced thermally in the early Universe, similarly to the particles of the Standard Model according to Big Bang cosmology, and usually will constitute cold dark matter. Obtaining the correct abundance of dark matter today via thermal production requires a self-annihilation cross section of ≃ 3×10−26 cm3⋅s−1, which is roughly what is expected for a new particle in the 100 GeV/c2 mass range that interacts via the electroweak force.
Experimental efforts to detect WIMPs include the search for products of WIMP annihilation, including gamma rays, neutrinos and cosmic rays in nearby galaxies and galaxy clusters; direct detection experiments designed to measure the collision of WIMPs with nuclei in the laboratory, as well as attempts to directly produce WIMPs in colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As of 2026, none of these efforts have shown success.
Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics readily predict new particles that could serve as WIMPs. This apparent coincidence is known as the "WIMP miracle", and a stable supersymmetric partner has long been a prime WIMP candidate. These candidate WIMPs include neutralinos and gravitinos. However, the lack of evidence for supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment have cast doubt on these simplest WIMP hypotheses.