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Current cosmological models and data suggest the existence of a cold Dark Matter (DM) component, however the nature of DM particles remains unknown. A favored candidate for DM is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) in the mass…
We explore the observational consequences of resonant particle production during inflation, focusing on its impact on dark matter annihilation signals today. A transient burst of particle production generates localised features in the…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) form a promising solution to the dark matter problem and many experiments are now searching for these particles. Using effective field theories to describe the interaction of the WIMP with the…
Dark matter appears in two forms as a consequence of the fluid mechanics of self-gravitational condensation. Condensation occurs primarily on non-acoustic nuclei rather than on the acoustic nuclei of the Jeans (1902) criterion, leading to a…
This work develops and explores a quantum-based theory which enables the nature and origin of cold dark matter (CDM) to be understood without need to introduce exotic particles. The quantum approach predicts the existence of certain…
Effective WIMP models are minimal extensions of the standard model that explain the relic density of dark matter by the ``WIMP miracle.'' In this paper we consider the phenomenology of effective WIMPs with trilinear couplings to leptons and…
Non-thermalized dark matter is a cosmologically valid alternative to the paradigm of weakly interacting massive particles. For dark matter belonging to a $Z_2$-odd sector that contains in addition a thermalized mediator particle, dark…
In this thesis, we investigate various possibilities of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter (DM) and their implications. These possibilities are important because they challenge the viability of WIMP DM in light of tight…
If dark matter is a new species of particle produced in the early universe as a cold thermal relic (a weakly-interacting massive particle-WIMP), its present abundance, its scattering with matter in direct-detection experiments, its…
A light scalar WIMP is studied in view of the recent results of the DAMA collaboration. In a scenario where both the WIMP's annihilation and its elastic scattering on nuclei occur dominantly through Higgs exchange, a one-to-one relation…
We propose a new mechanism where asymmetric dark matter (ADM) and the baryon asymmetry are both generated in the same decay chain of a metastable weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) after its thermal freeze-out. Dark matter and…
We consider two non-standard cosmological scenaria according to which the universe is reheated to a low reheating temperature after the late decay of a scalar field or is dominated by the kinetic energy of a quintessence field in the…
The Cold Dark Matter paradigm successfully explains many phenomena on scales larger than galaxies, but seems to predict galaxy halos which are more centrally concentrated and have a lumpier substructure than observed. Endowing cosmic dark…
The most prominent successes of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) models of dark matter are at comoving scales of megaparsecs. At kiloparsec scales they face challenges in explaining the density profiles, abundances and phase space…
The absence of any confirmative signals from extensive DM searching motivates us to go beyond the conventional WIMPs scenario. The feebly interacting massive particles (FIMPs) paradigm provides a good alternative which, despite of its…
The generation of dark matter in late decays of quasi-stable massive particles has been proposed as a viable framework to address the excess of power found in numerical N-body simulations for cold dark matter cosmologies. We identify a…
Direct dark matter searches are promising techniques to identify the nature of dark matter particles. I describe the future of this field of research, focussing on the question of what can be achieved in the next decade. I will present the…
SIMPLE (Superheated Instrument for Massive ParticLE searches) employs superheated droplet detectors (SDDs) to search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter. As a result of the intrinsic SDD insensitivity to minimum…
Warm Dark Matter (WDM) models have recently been resurrected to resolve apparent conflicts of Cold Dark Matter (DM) models with observations. Endowing the DM particles with non-negligible velocities causes free-streaming, which suppresses…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. We develop a model-independent method for determining the mass $m_\chi$ of the WIMP by using data (i.e., measured recoil energies) of direct…