Related papers: Giant monopoles as a dark matter candidate
We propose a model of dark matter: galaxy-sized 't Hooft-Polyakov magnetic monopoles in a new, extraordinarily weakly coupled SU(2) gauge sector with an adjoint Higgs field and two flavors of fundamental fermions. We fit the parameters by…
The magnetic monopole of a dark sector has been advocated as an appealing dark matter candidate. We revisit the computation of the monopole abundance $\Omega_M$, generated by a thermal phase transition in the minimal 't Hooft-Polyakov…
Several ideas for new physics beyond the standard model may provide particle candidates for the dark matter in the Galactic halo. The two leading candidates are an axion and a weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP), such as the…
If the dark sector contains 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles and a small enough dark gauge coupling, dark monopoles could be a macroscopic dark matter candidate. Its Higgs-portal coupling to the Standard Model can modify the electroweak vacuum…
In a secluded dark sector which is coupled to the Standard Model via a Higgs portal interaction we arrange for the existence of 't Hooft-Polyakov magnetic monopoles and study their implications for cosmology. We point out that a dark sector…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are among the favored candidates for cold dark matter in the universe. The phenomenology of supersymmetric WIMPs has been quite developed during recent years. However, there are other…
A hidden sector that kinetically mixes with the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model provides simple and well-motivated dark matter candidates that possess many of the properties of a traditional weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP).…
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…
Dark sectors with Abelian gauge symmetries can interact with ordinary matter via kinetic mixing. In such scenarios, magnetic monopoles of a broken dark $U(1)$ will appear in our sector as confined milli-magnetically charged objects under…
One of the most popular classes of candidates for dark matter are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), i.e. particles possessing masses and couplings falling roughly within the electroweak scale. Apart from offering a natural…
We deal with the presence of magnetic monopoles in a non Abelian model that generalizes the standard 't~Hooft-Polyakov model in three spatial dimensions. We investigate the energy density of the static and spherically symmetric solutions to…
Dark matter is one of the most important open problems in particle physics and cosmology. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) appear as an appealing solution, providing the right relic density with a cross-section at 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,…
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…
There is almost universal agreement among astronomers that most of the mass in the Universe and most of the mass in the Galactic halo is dark. Many lines of reasoning suggest that the dark matter consists of some new, as yet undiscovered,…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) remain the strongest candidates for the dark matter in the Universe. If WIMPs are the dark matter, they will form galactic halos according to the hierarchical clustering observed in N-body…
While the paradigm of a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) has guided our search strategies for dark matter in the past decades, their null-results have stimulated growing interest in alternative explanations pointing towards…
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,…
We propose a new alternative to the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) paradigm for dark matter. Rather than being determined by thermal freeze-out, the dark matter abundance in this scenario is set by dark matter decay, which is…
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…