Is dark matter a thermal-relic weakly interacting massive particle?

In plain words

A popular idea is that dark matter is a heavy particle that was in equilibrium with ordinary matter in the hot early universe and froze out at the right abundance. Underground detectors look for it hitting atomic nuclei.

Precise statement

Does a particle of mass $1\,\mathrm{GeV}\text{ to }100\,\mathrm{TeV}$, produced by thermal freeze-out with annihilation cross section $\langle \sigma v\rangle \sim 3 \times 10^{-26}\,\mathrm{cm}^{3}/\mathrm{s}$, make up $\Omega_c$? Answer yes (a detection of nuclear recoils, annihilation products or collider production consistent with the thermal cross section) or no for named benchmarks: exclusion of Higgs-portal and Z-portal thermal relics by direct detection, and of the pure wino ($\sim 2.9\,\mathrm{TeV}$) and pure Higgsino ($\sim 1.1\,\mathrm{TeV}$) thermal relics by gamma-ray line and continuum searches from the Galactic Center. Thermal relics with loop-suppressed nuclear couplings (pure Higgsino, $\sigma_{\mathrm{SI}} \sim 10^{-49}\text{ to }10^{-48}\,\mathrm{cm}^{2}$) lie at or below the xenon neutrino background floor, so direct detection alone cannot close the question.

What would settle it

Liquid-xenon or argon detectors reaching the neutrino background floor over $10\,\mathrm{GeV}$ to $10\,\mathrm{TeV}$, combined with gamma-ray line and continuum searches sensitive to wino and Higgsino annihilation at the thermal cross section.

Status in the literature

Unverified note: it names recent work and was partly written without a live literature search; it awaits a check by an editor.

LZ (2025, 4.2 tonne-years) found no excess and excluded spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross sections above $2.2 \times 10^{-48}\,\mathrm{cm}^{2}$ at 40 GeV (90 percent confidence).

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