Related papers: Dark Matter Astrophysics
The details of what constitutes the majority of the mass that makes up dark matter in the Universe remains one of the prime puzzles of cosmology and particle physics today - eighty years after the first observational indications. Today, it…
One of the major challenges of modern physics is to decipher the nature of dark matter. Astrophysical observations provide ample evidence for the existence of an invisible and dominant mass component in the observable universe, from the…
The problems of simple elementary weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) appeal to extend the physical basis for nonbaryonic dark matter. Such extension involves more sophisticated dark matter candidates from physics beyond the…
The complementarity of direct, indirect and collider searches for dark matter has improved our understanding concerning the properties of the dark matter particle. I will review the basic concepts that these methods rely upon and highlight…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), are a leading candidate for the dark matter that is observed to constitute ~25% of the total mass-energy density of the Universe. The direct detection of relic WIMPs (those produced during the…
Several aspects of the motivation for particle dark matter search are introduced. The experimental principles and present state of the most important experiments are presented. Direct searches for WIMPs are explained in some detail,…
The recent WMAP data have confirmed that exotic dark matter together with the vacuum energy (cosmological constant) dominate in the flat Universe. The nature of the dark matter constituents cannot be determined till they are directly…
This article gives an overview on the status of experimental searches for dark matter at the end of 2014. The main focus is on direct searches for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) using underground-based low-background…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are among the best-motivated dark matter candidates. In light of no conclusive detection signal yet despite an extensive search program that combines, often in a complementary way, direct,…
These lectures on non-baryonic dark matter matter are divided into two parts. In the first part, I discuss the need for non-baryonic dark matter in light of recent results in cosmology, and I present some of the most popular candidates for…
There is almost universal agreement among cosmologists that most of the matter in the Universe is dark, and there are very good reasons to believe that most of this dark matter must be nonbaryonic. The two leading candidates for this dark…
Light WIMPs are dark matter particle candidates with weak scale interaction with the known particles, and mass in the GeV to 10's of GeV range. Hints of light WIMPs have appeared in several dark matter searches in the last decade. The…
We investigate a new class of dark matter: superweakly-interacting massive particles (superWIMPs). As with conventional WIMPs, superWIMPs appear in well-motivated particle theories with naturally the correct relic density. In contrast to…
An ever-increasing body of evidence suggests that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) constitute the bulk of the matter in the Universe. We illustrate how experimental data, dimensional analysis and Standard Model particle physics…
About one-fourth of the universe is thought to consist of dark matter. Yet there is no clear understanding about the nature of these particles. Commonly discussed dark matter candidates includes the so called WIMPs or weakly interacting…
Dark matter constitutes one of the most intriguing but so far unresolved issues in physics today. In many extensions of the Standard Model the existence of a stable Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) is predicted. The WIMP is an…
After a short review of the arguments for the existence of Particle Dark Matter in the Universe, I list the most plausible candidates provided by particle physics, i.e. neutrinos, axions, and WIMPs. In each case I briefly describe how to…
The next decade will bring massive new data sets from experiments of the direct detection of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter. The primary goal of these experiments is to identify and characterize the dark-matter…
These lecture notes aim to provide an introduction to dark matter from the perspective of astrophysics/cosmology. We start with a rapid overview of cosmology, including the evolution of the Universe, its thermal history and structure…
The status of the recent efforts in the direct search for Weak Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) Dark Matter is briefly reviewed and the main achievements illustrated by the contributions presented to TAUP 99. The strategies followed in…