Neutralino Proton Cross Section and Dark Matter Detection

We consider the neutralino proton cross section for detection of Milky Way dark matter for a number of supergravity models with gauge unification at the GUT scale: models with universal soft breaking (mSUGRA), models with nonuniversal soft breaking, and string inspired D-brane models. The parameter space examined includes m1/2 <1 TeV and tan β < 50, and the recent Higgs bound of mh >114 GeV is imposed. (For grand unified models, this bound is to be imposed for all tan β.) All coannihilation effects are included as well as the recent NLO corrections to b → sγ for large tan β, and coannihilation effects are shown to be sensitive to A0 for large tan β. In all models, current detectors are sampling parts of the paramater space i. e. tan β > ∼ 25 for mSUGRA, tan β > ∼ 7 for nonuniversal models,