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Abstract

The Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) is one of the main candidates for the relic dark matter (DM). In the effective low-energy minimal supersymmetric standard model (effMSSM) the neutralino nucleon spin and scalar cross sections in the low-mass regime were calculated. The calculated cross sections are compared with almost all experimental currently available exclusion curves for spin-dependent WIMP-proton and WIMP-neutron cross sections. It is demonstrated that in general about 2 orders of magnitude improvement of the current DM experiment sensitivities is needed to reach the (effMSSM) supersymmetric (SUSY) predictions. At the current level of accuracy it looks reasonable to safely neglect subdominant spin WIMP nucleon contributions analyzing the data from spin-nonzero targets. To avoid misleading discrepancies between data and SUSY calculations it is, however, preferable to use a mixed spin-scalar coupling approach. This approach is applied to estimate future prospects of experiments with the odd-neutron high-spin isotope ⁷³Ge. It is noticed that the DAMA evidence favors the light Higgs sector in the effMSSM, a high event rate in a ⁷³Ge detector and relatively high up-going muon fluxes from relic neutralino annihilations in the Earth and the Sun.