Recent developments in dark matter detection: a report from the 3 rd International Workshop on the Identification of Dark Matter (York, September 2000)

Recent developments in the field of dark matter detection are reviewed, with particular emphasis on those techniques presented at the 3^rd International Workshop on the Identification of Dark Matter (IDM2000) in York, UK. Direct search dark matter experiments are challenging due to the twin requirements of extremely low energy thresholds for nuclear recoil signal events coupled with the absence of significant numbers of electron recoil background events. Methods for achieving low thresholds and low backgrounds in these detectors are described, as are novel techniques for performing electron recoil background rejection