Hunting for WIMPs in the Panda Land

Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), with properties similar to those of a heavy neutrino, have been a leading candidate for the 27% dark matter in the Universe. Apart from observations of direct creation through high-energy colliders like LHC and annihilation signals at the center of the Milky Way, they can be detected directly through collisions with the ordinary matter on the Earth. Direct detection experiments have made huge strides in the last decade, improving the sensitivity by more than five orders of magnitude. In this talk, I will review the status of direct detections and describe an adventure of a large-scale experiment, PandaX, in the world's deep underground lab in the high mountains of the western China.​