Related papers: Are We Entering a Paradigm Shift for Dark Matter?
I briefly review our current understanding of dark matter and dark energy. The first part of this paper focusses on issues pertaining to dark matter including observational evidence for its existence, current constraints and the `abundance…
These lectures describe how the Standard Model of cosmology ($\Lambda$CDM) has developped, based on observational facts but also on ideas formed in the context of the theory of fundamental interactions, both gravitational and…
The Cold Dark Matter theory of gravitationally-driven hierarchical structure formation has earned its status as a paradigm by explaining the distribution of matter over large spans of cosmic distance and time. However, its central tenet,…
The phenomenon of the Dark matter baffles the researchers: the underlying dark particle has escaped so far the detection and its astrophysical role appears complex and entangled with that of the standard luminous particles. We propose that,…
The cold dark matter (CDM) cosmological model has been remarkably successful in explaining cosmic structure over an enormous span of redshift, but it has faced persistent challenges from observations that probe the innermost regions of dark…
The late time acceleration of the Universe has challenged contemporary cosmology since its discovery. General Relativity explains this phenomenon by introducing the cosmological constant, named the standard cosmological model…
The $\rm\Lambda$CDM cosmological model is remarkable: with just 6 parameters it describes the evolution of the Universe from a very early time when all structures were quantum fluctuations on subatomic scales to the present, and it is…
The success of the Lambda-CDM model on large scales does not extend down to galaxy scales. We list a dozen problems of the dark matter hypothesis, some of which arise in specific models for the formation of structure in the universe, while…
The current standard model of cosmology - the {\ensuremath{\Lambda}}CDM model - is appropriately named after its controversial foreign ingredients: a cosmological constant ({\ensuremath{\Lambda}}) that accounts for the recent accelerated…
The cold dark matter (DM) paradigm describes the large-scale structure of the universe remarkably well. However, there exists some tension with the observed abundances and internal density structures of both field dwarf galaxies and…
Dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the observable Universe. Yet the physical nature of these two phenomena remains a mystery. Einstein suggested a long-forgotten solution: gravitationally repulsive negative masses, which drive…
Cosmology is entering a very exciting time in its history, when a wealth of cutting-edge experiments are all starting to collect data, or about to. These experiments aim at addressing some of the most intriguing questions in fundamental…
Observations provide increasingly strong evidence that the universe is accelerating. This revolutionary advance in cosmological observations confronts theoretical cosmology with a tremendous challenge, which it has so far failed to meet.…
This thesis focuses on late-time cosmic acceleration within modified theories of gravity, using various observational data sets and statistical analysis. The Universe is assumed to be spatially homogeneous and isotropic and is described by…
Several works in the last few years devoted to measure fundamental probes of contemporary cosmology have suggested the existence of a delocalized dominant component (the "dark energy"), in addition to the several-decade-old evidence for…
In the standard cosmological model, the Universe consists mainly of two invisible substances: vacuum energy with constant mass-density rho_v=\Lambda/(8pi G) (where Lambda is a `cosmological constant' originally proposed by Einstein and G is…
The Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model, wherein the dark matter is treated as a pressureless perfect fluid, provides a good fit to galactic and cosmological data. With the advent of precision cosmology, it should be asked whether this simplest…
It is now, generally, believed that the presence of some form of dark matter is essential to explain the flat rotation curves of galaxies, and anomalous large velocities of galaxies in the clusters and superclusters. This dark matter turns…
The $\Lambda$CDM framework offers a remarkably good description of our universe with a very small number of free parameters, which can be determined with high accuracy from currently available data. However, this does not mean that the…
Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of the Universe -- spatially flat; accelerating; comprised of 1/3 a new form of matter, 2/3 a new form of energy, with some ordinary matter and a dash of massive neutrinos; and…