Related papers: TASI 2008 Lectures on Dark Matter
A leading hypothesis for the nature of the elusive dark matter are thermally produced, weakly interacting massive particles that arise in many theories beyond the standard model of particle physics. Their self-annihilation in astrophysical…
An overview is given of various dark matter candidates. Among the many suggestions given in the literature, axions, inert Higgs doublet, sterile neutrinos, supersymmetric particles and Kaluza-Klein particles are discussed. The situation has…
In these lectures we first briefly review the main observational facts which imply that most part of matter in the Universe is not visible and some recent intriguing experimental data which would point to a significant contribution to Omega…
The indirect detection of dark matter annihilation and decay using observations of photons, charged cosmic rays, and neutrinos offers a promising means of identifying the particle nature of this elusive component of the universe. The last…
From astronomical observations, we know that dark matter exists, makes up 23% of the mass budget of the Universe, clusters strongly to form the load-bearing frame of structure for galaxy formation, and hardly interacts with ordinary matter…
In this article I review model-independent procedures for extracting properties of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) from direct Dark Matter detection experiments. Neither prior knowledge about the velocity distribution function…
The identity of dark matter is one of the key outstanding problems in both particle and astrophysics. In this thesis, I review some candidates of dark matter, especially WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) which is one of the best…
The detection of dark matter is central to particle physics and cosmology. Current fashionable supersymmetric models provide a dark matter candidate, the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). When combined with fairly well understood…
One of the great scientific enigmas still unsolved, the existence of dark matter, is reviewed. Simple gravitational arguments imply that most of the mass in the Universe, at least 90%, is some (unknown) non-luminous matter. Some particle…
The cold dark matter of the Universe may be comprised of very light and very weakly interacting particles, so-called WISPs. Two prominent examples are hidden photons and axion-like particles. In this note we propose a new technique to…
In these notes we present a selection of topics, each section approximately amounting to one lecture. We begin with a brief recapitulation of General Relativity, and the Standard Model of Cosmology. This is followed by lectures on important…
The era of precision cosmology has revealed that about 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter. Two well-motivated candidates are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and weakly interacting sub-eV particles (WISPs) (e.g.…
For the SUSY 2007 conference, I was asked to review the topic of indirect searches for dark matter. As part of that talk, I summarized several observations which have been interpreted as the product of dark matter annihilations. In my…
A brief overview is given about some issues in current astroparticle physics, focusing on the dark matter (DM) problem, where the connection to LHC physics is particularly strong. New data from the Planck satellite has made the evidence in…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. So far we can use direct Dark Matter detection to estimate the mass of halo WIMPs only by fitting predicted recoil spectra to future…
The nature of dark matter is one of the most pressing questions in modern cosmology. Much work has been focussed in the past upon probing potential particle dark matter via gamma-rays resulting from its annihilation or decay. These processs…
It is discussed how the ideas of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, conceived long ago during the nineteenth century, underly why cosmological dark matter exists and originated in the first three years of the universe in the form…
Much like ordinary matter, dark matter might consist of elementary particles, and weakly interacting massive particles are one of the prime suspects. During the past decade, the sensitivity of experiments trying to directly detect them has…
Underground laboratories host two kind of experiments at the frontier of our knowledge in Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology: the direct detection of the Dark Matter of the Universe and the search for the Neutrinoless Double Beta…
The nature of Dark Matter (DM) remains one of the most important unresolved questions of fundamental physics. Many models, including Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), assume DM to be a particle and predict a weak coupling with…