Instituto de Física Teórica UAM/CSIC (Webpage 2008-2015)

A variety of astrophysical and cosmological observations provide convincing evidence that the matter budget of the Universe is dominated by Dark Matter, made of some new, yet undiscovered, particles. One of the main candidates to account for this dark matter is a generic Weakly-Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). Remarkably, some well-motivated extensions of the SM, such as Supersymmetry (SUSY) and theories with extra-dimensions, can naturally provide excellent examples of WIMPs. Impressive experimental efforts have been carried out aimed at the direct detection of WIMPs through their elastic scattering with nuclei in a detector. Although current experiments are mainly sensitive to the scalar part of the WIMP-nucleon interaction, some new experiments have been designed with an increased sensitivity to the axial, or spin-dependent contribution. This is the case of COUPP, which exploits an old technique (bubble chamber). In this talk I will address the potential of COUPP to explore the parameter space of neutralinos (in SUSY theories) and Kaluza-Klein dark matter (in theories with extra dimensions), and the complementarity of the spin-dependent and spin-independent searches in discriminating dark matter candidates.