Physics Colloquium

The Borexino experiment at Gran Sasso achieved the first real time observation of low energy solar neutrinos (<2 MeV), breaking the background barrier of natural radioactivity for the first time in 40 years of exploration of solar neutrinos. I will report on the recent results and their significance for neutrino and solar physic and discuss the prospects for future measurements. Direct searches for WIMP Dark Matter are se poised for a quantum leap in sensitivity. The new generation of liquid noble gas detectors promises to increase the current sensitivity by many orders of magnitude in the next few years. I will discuss recent results with a 3-kg detector and prospects of the WARP 150-kg liquid argon currently under construction at Gran Sasso. I will also report on the recent discovery of the Princeton group by a first source of underground argon depleted in the cosmogenic 39Ar. This discovery opens a possibility for the construction of multi-ton argon-based detectors, capable of exploring a very broad range of WIMP Dark Matter candidates suggested by SUSY theories, with sensitivity to the WIMP-nucleon cross section extending below 10^-10 pbarn and sensitivity for the WIMP mass up to many TeV's.