Related papers: Cosmic Deconstructionism
The astronomical dark matter is an essential component of the Universe and yet its nature is still unresolved. It could be made of neutral and massive elementary particles which are their own antimatter partners. These dark matter species…
Progress in observational cosmology over the past five years has established that the Universe is dominated dynamically by dark matter and dark energy. Both these new and apparently independent forms of matter-energy have properties that…
The continuous infall of dark matter with low velocity dispersion from all directions in a galactic halo leads to the formation of caustics which are very small scale ($\sim$parsec) high density structures. If the dark matter is made up of…
We consider the consequences of a matter power spectrum which rises on small scales until eventually being cutoff by microphysical processes associated with the particle nature of dark matter. Evolving the perturbations of a weakly…
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 may be composed of superWIMPs, superweakly-interacting massive particles produced in the late decays of other particles. We focus here on the well-motivated supersymmetric example of gravitino LSPs. Gravitino superWIMPs share…
If Dark Matter (DM) is composed by Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, its annihilation in the halos harboring the earliest star formation episode may strongly influence the first generation of stars (Population III). Whereas DM…
Cold dark matter may be made of superweakly-interacting massive particles, superWIMPs, that naturally inherit the desired relic density from late decays of metastable WIMPs. Well-motivated examples are weak-scale gravitinos in supergravity…
About one-fourth of the universe is thought to consist of dark matter. Yet there is no clear understanding about the nature of these particles. Commonly discussed dark matter candidates includes the so called WIMPs or weakly interacting…
We have strong evidence on all cosmic scales, from galaxies to the largest structures ever observed, that there is more matter in the universe than we can see. Galaxies and clusters would fly apart unless they would be held together by…
We propose a simple model in which the cosmological dark matter consists of particles whose mass increases with the scale factor of the universe. The particle mass is generated by the expectation value of a scalar field which does not have…
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…
Collisionless, cold dark matter in the form of weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs) is well-motivated in particle physics, naturally yields the observed relic density, and successfully explains structure formation on large scales.…
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…
Dark matter self-annihilation holds promise as one of the most robust mechanisms for the identification of the particle responsible for the Universe's missing mass. In this work, I examine the evolution of the dark matter annihilation power…
In existing dark matter models with global symmetries the relic abundance of dark matter is either equal to that of anti-dark matter (thermal WIMP), or vastly larger, with essentially no remaining anti-dark matter (asymmetric dark matter).…
Assuming that Dark Matter is dominated by WIMPs, it accretes by gravitational attraction and scattering over baryonic material and annihilates inside celestial objects, giving rise to a "Dark Luminosity" which may potentially affect the…
Cosmological structure formation predicts that our galactic halo contains an enormous hierarchy of substructures and streams, the remnants of the merging hierarchy that began with tiny Earth mass microhalos. If these structures persist…
We present the first 3D simulations to include the effects of dark matter annihilation feedback during the collapse of primordial mini-halos. We begin our simulations from cosmological initial conditions and account for dark matter…
An initial state for the observable universe consisting of a finite region with a large vacuum energy will break-up due to near horizon quantum critical fluctuations. This will lead to a Friedmann-like early universe consisting of an…