Related papers: WISPy Cold Dark Matter
Cosmology and particle physics are closer today than ever before, with several searches underway at the interface between cosmology, particle physics, and field theory. The mystery of dark matter (DM) is one of the greatest common unsolved…
The cosmological observations of gravitational lenses, cosmic microwave background, rotation speed of stars in galaxies confirm the existence of about 27% dark matter in the Universe. The nature of these particles is unknown, however, there…
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,…
Recent theoretical and experimental studies highlight the possibility of new fundamental particle physics beyond the Standard Model that can be probed by sub-eV energy experiments. The OSQAR photon regeneration experiment looks for "Light…
Progress in observational cosmology over the past five years has established that the Universe is dominated dynamically by dark matter and dark energy. Both these new and apparently independent forms of matter-energy have properties that…
We present an overview over the current status of laboratory experiments searching for (very) weakly coupled slim particles (WISPs). These experiments at the high precision frontier explore new physics beyond the standard model in a…
The axion-like particle (ALP), a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson that couples to two photons, has been studied extensively in recent years as a dark matter candidate. For initial field configurations in a minimal ALP model explaining the…
I will begin by reviewing the evidence for Dark Matter in the Universe, as well as the candidates for dark matter. At most 20% of the dark matter in galaxies can be in the form of MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects); the remainder appears…
Axion-like particle (ALP) dark matter shows distinctive behavior on scales where wavelike effects dominate over self-gravity. Ultralight axions are candidates for fuzzy dark matter (FDM) whose de Broglie wavelength in virialized halos…
The dark photon is a massive hypothetical particle that interacts with the Standard Model by kinetically mixing with the visible photon. For small values of the mixing parameter, dark photons can evade cosmological bounds to be a viable…
Ultralight axion-like particles (ALPs) are well-motivated dark matter candidates introduced by theories beyond the standard model. However, the constraints on the existence of ALPs through existing laboratory experiments are hindered by…
We consider an axion-like particle (ALP) coupled to Standard Model (SM) fermions as a mediator between the SM and a fermionic dark matter (DM) particle. We explore the case where the ALP-SM and/or the ALP-DM couplings are too small to allow…
The identity of dark matter is a question of central importance in both astrophysics and particle physics. In the past, the leading particle candidates were cold and collisionless, and typically predicted missing energy signals at particle…
Axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) are well-motivated dark matter (DM) candidates whose coupling to photons induces periodic oscillations in the polarization angle of astrophysical light. This work reports the first search for such a…
The Weakly Interacting Massive Particles(WIMPs) have long been the favored CDM candidate in the standard $\Lambda$CDM model. However, owing to great improvement in the experimental sensitivity in the past decade, some parameter space of the…
We investigate the production of dark radiation (DR) from axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) as potential origins of dark matter. Focusing on the dark matter misalignment mechanism, we examine non-thermal, pre-inflationary scenarios…
The elucidation of the nature of dark matter is one of the challenging tasks in astroparticle physics. A brief overview on the different methods to search directly for dark matter in form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) is…
The misalignment mechanism for axion-like particles (ALPs) is a leading explanation for dark matter. In this work we investigate ALPs with non-periodic potentials, which allow for large misalignment of the field from the minimum and make it…
We consider the production of axion dark matter through the misalignment mechanism in the context of a nonstandard cosmological history involving early matter domination by a scalar field with a time-dependent decay rate. In cases where the…
WIMPs, weakly-interacting massive particles, have been leading candidates for particle dark matter for decades, and they remain a viable and highly motivated possibility. In these lectures, I describe the basic motivations for WIMPs,…