Related papers: Statistical Issues in Astrophysical Searches for P…
The existence of dark matter (DM) was first noticed by Zwicky in the 1930s, but its nature remains one of the great unsolved problems of physics. A variety of observations indicate that it is non-baryonic and non-relativistic. One of the…
I present the status of direct dark matter detection with specific attention to the experimental results and their phenomenological interpretation in terms of dark matter interactions. In particular I review a new and more general approach…
The Bayes factor surface is a new way to present results from experimental searches for new physics. Searches are regularly expressed in terms of phenomenological parameters - such as the mass and cross-section of a weakly interacting…
Astronomical and cosmological observations of the past 80 years build solid evidence that atomic matter makes up only a small fraction of the matter in the universe. The dominant fraction does not interact with electromagnetic radiation,…
Exotic dark matter together with dark energy or cosmological constant seem to dominate in the Universe. An even higher density of such matter seems to be gravitationally trapped in our Galaxy. The nature of dark matter can be unveiled only,…
In this pedestrian approach I give my personal point of view on the various problems posed by dark matter in the universe. After a brief historical overview I discuss the various solutions stemming from high energy particle physics, and the…
Data analysis in science, e.g., high-energy particle physics, is often subject to an intractable likelihood if the observables and observations span a high-dimensional input space. Typically the problem is solved by reducing the…
Previous searches for the $\gamma$-ray signatures of annihilating galactic dark matter used predefined spatial templates to describe the background of $\gamma$-ray emission from astrophysical processes like cosmic ray interactions. In this…
Searches for new astrophysical phenomena often involve several sources of non-random uncertainties which can lead to highly misleading results. Among these, model-uncertainty arising from background mismodelling can dramatically compromise…
We consider the possibility that the cosmological dark matter consists of particles very close in mass to new colored particles below the TeV scale. While such a scenario is inherently difficult to directly confirm at colliders, we find…
The dark-matter candidates of particle physics invariably possess electromagnetic interactions, if only via quantum fluctuations. Taken en masse, dark matter can thus engender an index of refraction which deviates from its vacuum value. Its…
In this work we discuss the impact of nuisance parameters on the effectiveness of machine learning in high-energy physics problems, and provide a review of techniques that allow to include their effect and reduce their impact in the search…
New particles can manifest their effects in many settings, ranging from effects on sub-atomic to galactic length scales. The nature of these effects depends on the specific particles and their non-gravitational interactions. In this…
A leading candidate for astrophysical dark matter (DM) is a massive particle with a mass in the range from 50 GeV to greater than 10 TeV and an interaction cross section on the weak scale. The self-annihilation of such particles in…
Indirect detection strategies of particle Dark Matter (DM) in Dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies (dSphs) typically entail searching for annihilation signals above the astrophysical background. To robustly compare model predictions with the…
A weakly interacting dark-matter particle may be difficult to discover at an accelerator because it either (1) is too massive, (2) has no standard-model gauge interactions, or (3) is almost degenerate with other states. In each of these…
Astrophysical observations indicate that about 23% of the energy density of the universe is in the form of non-baryonic particles beyond the standard model of particle physics. One exciting and well motivated candidate is the lightest…
The combination of S-matrix unitarity and the dynamics of thermal freeze-out for massive relic particles (denoted here simply by WIMPs) implies a lower limit on the density of such particles, that provide a (potentially sub-dominant)…
In this paper we assess the present status of dark matter direct searches by means of Bayesian statistics. We consider three particle physics models for spin-independent dark matter interaction with nuclei: elastic, inelastic and isospin…
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…