Related papers: The Dark Matter Enigma
Dark matter has been introduced to explain mass deficits noted at different astronomical scales, in galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and even across the full horizon. Dark matter makes itself felt only through its…
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,…
Multiple astrophysical and cosmological observations show that the majority of the matter in the universe is non-luminous. It is not made of known particles, and it is called dark matter. This is one of the few pieces of concrete…
Our standard model of the Universe predicts the distribution of dark matter to $1\%$ at the scales needed for upcoming experiments, yet our predictions for how the luminous matter -- which has interactions besides gravity -- is distributed…
This paper presents a brief review of the evidence for dark matter in the Universe on the scales of galaxies. In the interests of critically and objectively testing the dark matter paradigm on these scales, this evidence is weighed against…
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…
Several aspects of the motivation for particle dark matter search are introduced. The experimental principles and present state of the most important experiments are presented. Direct searches for WIMPs are explained in some detail,…
We review the features of Dark Matter as a particle, presenting some old and new instructive models, and looking for their physical implications in the early universe and in the process of structure formation. We also present a schematic of…
Recent breakthroughs in cosmology reveal that a quarter of the Universe is composed of dark matter, but the microscopic identity of dark matter remains a deep mystery. I review recent progress in resolving this puzzle, focusing on two…
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…
In the first section, I will try to convey a sense of the variety of observational inputs that tell us about the existence and the spatial distribution of dark matter in the universe. In the second section, I will briefly review the four…
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%…
The acceleration of the cosmic expansion is a fundamental challenge to standard models of particle physics and cosmology. The new physics of dark energy may lie in the nature of gravity, the quantum vacuum, or extra dimensions. I give a…
The problems of simple elementary weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) appeal to extend the physical basis for nonbaryonic dark matter. Such extension involves more sophisticated dark matter candidates from physics beyond the…
The nature of dark matter is one of the most pressing questions in particle physics. Yet all our present knowledge of the dark sector to date comes from its gravitational interactions with astrophysical systems. Moreover, astronomical…
Since neither supersymmetry nor dark matter WIMPs have yet been observed, pessimism about their reality has been growing. Here we discuss a new supersymmetric theory and a new dark matter candidate which are naturally consistent with…
We consider the problem of the flattening of the velocity curves in galactic discs and the consequent postulation of dark matter from three different but converging perspectives-- a change in the large scale dimensionality of space, a…
The problem of explaining the acceleration of the expansion of the universe and the observational and theoretical difficulties associated with dark matter and dark energy are discussed. The possibility that GR does not correctly describe…
I begin by briefly reviewing the evidence for the existence of Dark Matter (DM), emphasizing that {\em many} observations, at length scales between kpc (the size of the smallest galaxies) and Gpc (the Hubble radius) can be described by the…
I review the problem of dark energy focusing on the cosmological constant as the candidate and discuss its implications for the nature of gravity. Part 1 briefly overviews the currently popular `concordance cosmology' and summarises the…