Related papers: Particle dark matter: an overview
There is almost universal agreement among cosmologists that most of the matter in the Universe is dark, and there are very good reasons to believe that most of this dark matter must be nonbaryonic. The two leading candidates for this dark…
We describe the very nature of the elementary particles, which our (visible) Universe consists of. We point out that they are not point-like, and we depict their ways of interacting. We also address puzzles that occur even in the absence of…
Modern cosmology successfully deals with the origin and the evolution of the Universe at large scales, but it is unable to completely answer the question about the nature of the fundamental objects that it is describing. As a matter of…
Recent cosmological and astrophysical observations point out that the Universe is in accelerating expansion and filled up with non-luminous matter. In order to explain the observed large scale structures and this accelerating behavior one…
Since the daring intuition by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 about the existence of dark matter in the Universe, in spite of the extensive investigations pursued over a very long lapse of time, the nature of this matter and of its (other than…
Some theoretical and experimental aspects regarding the direct dark matter field are mentioned. In particular some arguments, which play a relevant role in the evaluation of model dependent interpretations of experimental results and in…
We discuss several cosmological production mechanisms for nonthermal supermassive dark matter and argue that dark matter may be elementary particles of mass much greater than the weak scale. Searches for dark matter should not be limited to…
This Report provides an extensive review of the experimental programme of direct detection searches of particle dark matter. It focuses mostly on European efforts, both current and planned, but does it within a broader context of a…
Under the assumption that dark matter is made of new particles, annihilations of those are required to reproduce the correct dark matter abundance in the Universe. This process can occur in dense regions of our Galaxy such as the Galactic…
In this Report we discuss the four complementary searches for the identity of dark matter: direct detection experiments that look for dark matter interacting in the lab, indirect detection experiments that connect lab signals to dark matter…
The astronomical dark matter could be made of weakly interacting and massive particles. If so, these species would be abundant inside the Milky Way, where they would continuously annihilate and produce cosmic rays. Those annihilation…
We discuss arguments both in favor of and against dark matter. With the repeated failure of experiment to date to detect dark matter we discuss what could be done instead, and to this end look for clues in the data themselves. We identify…
Dark energy appears to be the dominant component of the physical Universe, yet there is no persuasive theoretical explanation for its existence or magnitude. The acceleration of the Universe is, along with dark matter, the observed…
There is a strong possibility that the particles making up the dark matter in the Universe have a mass below 1 eV and in many important situations exhibit a wave-like behavior. Amongst the candidates the axion stands out as particularly…
Dark matter remains one of the most puzzling mysteries in Fundamental Physics of our times. Experiments at high-energy physics colliders are expected to shed light to its nature and determine its properties. This review focuses on recent…
The nature of dark matter (DM), which is supposed to constitute about one-fourth of the universe, is still a mystery. There is evidence that much of the DM may be made up of as yet undiscovered particles with several experiments all over…
To the astrophysicist faced with the puzzle of dark matter, this one appears under two different aspects: on the one hand in cosmology, i.e. at very large scales, where it seems to be made of a bath of particles; on the other hand at the…
Based on lectures given at the 2008 Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (TASI), I review here some aspects of the phenomenology of particle dark matter, including the process of thermal freeze-out in the early universe, and the direct and…
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…
The next decade will bring massive new data sets from experiments of the direct detection of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter. The primary goal of these experiments is to identify and characterize the dark-matter…