  One of the major challenges of modern physics is to decipher the nature of
dark matter. Astrophysical observations provide ample evidence for the
existence of an invisible and dominant mass component in the observable
universe, from the scales of galaxies up to the largest cosmological scales.
The dark matter could be made of new, yet undiscovered elementary particles,
with allowed masses and interaction strengths with normal matter spanning an
enormous range. Axions, produced non-thermally in the early universe, and
weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which froze out of thermal
equilibrium with a relic density matching the observations, represent two
well-motivated, generic classes of dark matter candidates. Dark matter axions
could be detected by exploiting their predicted coupling to two photons, where
the highest sensitivity is reached by experiments using a microwave cavity
permeated by a strong magnetic field. WIMPs could be directly observed via
scatters off atomic nuclei in underground, ultra low-background detectors, or
indirectly, via secondary radiation produced when they pair annihilate. They
could also be generated at particle colliders such as the LHC, where associated
particles produced in the same process are to be detected. After a brief
motivation and an introduction to the phenomenology of particle dark matter
detection, I will discuss the most promising experimental techniques to search
for axions and WIMPs, addressing their current and future science reach, as
well as their complementarity.
