Searching for WIMPs via Direct Detection: Where are we and what comes next?

Understanding the nature of dark matter is one of the biggest challenges in physics today. Over the past two decades, experiments searching for ~100 GeV dark matter particles have made incredible progress, gaining over five orders of magnitude in sensitivity, or doubling in sensitivity every 1.25 years. These experiments have grown from the the size of a small coffee cup to multi-ton detectors operating deep underground in labs around the world. To achieve this sensitivity, experimenters have had to screen, clean, and take care not to re-contaminate every single bolt and screw that goes into the detector to prevent radioactivity from mimicking a potential dark matter signal. It is a triumph of human ingenuity. Despite these successes, however, no dark matter particles have been found, and in some ways, we know less now than we thought we did twenty years ago. In this talk, I'll give a description of some of the ways we search for weak-scale dark matter particles, and talk about what comes next as we approach the end of the first major era of dark matter detection.