Related papers: Dark Matter Search Experiments
The majority of the matter in the universe is still unidentified and under investigation by both direct and indirect means. Many experiments searching for the recoil of dark-matter particles off target nuclei in underground laboratories…
The dark matter problem is almost a century old. Since the 1930s evidence has been growing that our cosmos is dominated by a new form of non-baryonic matter, that holds galaxies and clusters together and influences cosmic structures up to…
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…
Dark matter is a fundamental constituent of the universe, which is needed to explain a wide variety of astrophysical and cosmological observations. Although the existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly a century ago and its…
Numerous lines of evidence indicate that the matter content of the Universe is dominated by some unseen component. Determining the nature of this Dark Matter is one of the most important problems in cosmology. Weakly Interacting Massive…
Dark Matter is one of the most intriguing riddles of modern astrophysics. The Standard Cosmological Model implies that only 4.5% of the mass-energy of the Universe is baryonic matter and the remaining 95% is unknown. Of this remainder, 22%…
Over the past decade, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter. The observational evidence for the existence of dark matter is reviewed: rotation curves of galaxies, weak lensing…
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…
The existence of dark matter was suggested, using simple gravitational arguments, seventy years ago. Although we are now convinced that most of the mass in the Universe is indeed some non-luminous matter, we still do not know its…
Ordinary baryonic particles (such as protons and neutrons) account for only one-sixth of the total matter in the Universe. The remainder is a mysterious "dark matter" component, which does not interact via electromagnetism and thus neither…
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…
We know from cosmological and astrophysical observations that more than 80% of the matter density in the Universe is non-luminous, or dark. This non-baryonic dark matter could be composed of neutral, heavy particles, which were…
Based on the results from numerous astrophysics experiments, it is currently believed that the majority of matter in the Universe is in some unknown form, known as dark matter. In the past it has been common to model dark matter as a…
We review progress in understanding dark matter by astrophysics, and particularly via the effect of gravitational lensing. Evidence from many different directions now all imply that five sixths of the material content of the universe is in…
The existence of Dark Matter (DM) is a well established fact since many decades, thanks to the observation of the effects of its gravitational interaction with the ordinary matter in the Universe. However, our knowledge of the Dark Matter…
[A brief review intended for a general physics colloquium audience.] Astrophysicists now know that 80% of the matter in the universe is `dark matter', composed of neutral and weakly interacting elementary particles that are not part of the…
Astronomical observations from small galaxies to the largest scales in the universe can be consistently explained by the simple idea of dark matter. The nature of dark matter is however still unknown. Empirically it cannot be any of the…
Solving the Dark Matter enigma represents one of the key objectives of contemporary physics. Recent astrophysical and cosmological measurements have unambiguously demonstrated that ordinary matter contributes to less than 5 % of the energy…
The problem of the dark matter in the universe is reviewed. A short history of the subject is given, and several of the most obvious particle candidates for dark matter are identified. Particular focus is given to weakly interacting,…
We consider a feeble repulsive interaction between ordinary matter and dark matter, with a range similar to or larger than the size of the Earth. Dark matter can thus be repelled from the Earth, leading to null results in direct detection…