Not just in fairytales: Exploring the dark forest

Astrophysical evidence for dark matter abounds, and its importance in large scale structure formation in the universe is clear. The broad categories of dark matter candidates, the ’dark forest’, and their global searches will be discussed. We’ll focus on the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) and the direct detection searches utilizing the world-leading technology of liquid xenon time projection chambers, presenting the results and status of the LZ detector. We’ll conclude with future goals and prospects for IMPmearches and the XLZD consortium, which brings together the XENONnT, DARWIN, and LZ collaborations, and return to the global exploration of the dark forest.