Related papers: First Results on Dark Matter Substructure from Ast…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies by foreground structures has proven to be a powerful tool to study the mass distribution in the universe. The advent of panoramic cameras on 4m class telescope has led to a first generation of…
Stellar streams are a promising way to probe the gravitational effects of low-mass dark matter (DM) subhalos. In recent years, there has been a remarkable explosion in the number of stellar streams detected in the Milky Way, and hundreds…
Microlensing provides a unique tool to break the stellar to dark matter degeneracy in the inner Milky Way. We combine N-body dynamical models fitted to the Milky Way's Boxy/Peanut bulge with exponential disk models outside this, and compute…
The presence of substructures in dark matter haloes is an unavoidable consequence of the cold dark matter paradigm. Indirect signals from these objects have been extensively searched for with cosmic rays and gamma-rays. At first sight,…
Microlensing has established itself as a powerful new method for the detection of baryonic dark matter in the Galaxy. The theory of microlensing is sketched and its similarity with the optical effect of twinkling is explained. The bulk of…
There are a number of theoretical and observational hints that large numbers of low-mass galaxies composed entirely of dark matter exist in the field. The theoretical considerations follow from the prediction of cold dark matter theory that…
Strong gravitational lensing provides a powerful test of Cold Dark Matter (CDM) as it enables the detection and mass measurement of low mass haloes even if they do not contain baryons. Compact lensed sources such as Active Galactic Nuclei…
The weak gravitational lensing of high redshift type Ia supernovae has the potential of probing the structure of matter on galaxy halo scales. This is complementary to the weak lensing of galaxies which probes structure of larger scales.…
Unveiling the fundamental nature of non-baryonic dark matter (DM) has profound implications for our understanding of the Universe and of the physical laws that govern it. Its manifestation as an additional source of matter necessary to…
The dark matter (DM) blind spots in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) refer to the parameter regions where the couplings of the DM particles to the $Z$-boson or the Higgs boson are almost zero, leading to vanishingly small…
Microlensing searches aim to detect compact halo dark matter via its gravitational lensing effect on stars within the Large Magellanic Cloud. The most recent results have led to the claim that roughly one fifth of the galactic halo dark…
A decade ago cosmological simulations of increasingly higher resolution were used to demonstrate that virialized regions of Cold Dark Matter (CDM) halos are filled with a multitude of dense, gravitationally-bound clumps. These dark matter…
In the thermal dark matter (DM) paradigm, primordial interactions between DM and Standard Model particles are responsible for the observed DM relic density. In Boehm et al. (2014), we showed that weak-strength interactions between DM and…
Dark matter (DM) subhalos offer critical tests of cosmological models through their abundance and properties, yet most remain undetectable due to their lack of stars. We investigate whether their presence leaves measurable imprints on the…
In this work, we investigate the discovery potential of low-mass Galactic dark matter (DM) subhaloes for indirect searches of DM. We use data from the Via Lactea II (VL-II) N-body cosmological simulation, which resolves subhaloes down to…
While the $\Lambda$CDM model succeeds on large scales, its validity on smaller scales remains uncertain. Recent works suggest that non-halo dark matter structures, such as filaments and walls, could significantly influence gravitational…
We study the prospects for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to find new dwarf spheroidal galaxies in the Milky Way. Adopting models of Milky-Way halo substructure and phenomenological prescriptions connecting subhalos and…
We review dark matter (DM) candidates of a very low mass, appearing in the window below the traditional weakly-interacting massive particle $m_\chi \lesssim 10$ GeV and extending down to $m_\chi \gtrsim 1$ meV, somewhat below the mass limit…
While dark matter (DM) is the key ingredient for a successful theory of structure formation, its microscopic nature remains elusive. Indirect detection may provide a powerful test for some strongly motivated DM particle models.…
We present the results of a study of weak lensing by galaxies based on 45.5 deg$^2$ of $R_C$ band imaging data from the Red-Sequence Cluster Survey (RCS). We present the first weak lensing detection of the flattening of galaxy dark matter…