Related papers: SuperWIMP Solutions to Small Scale Structure Probl…
These lectures are intended to provide a brief pedagogical review of dark matter for the newcomer to the subject. We begin with a discussion of the astrophysical evidence for dark matter. The standard weakly-interacting massive particle…
The recent WMAP data have confirmed that exotic dark matter together with the vacuum energy (cosmological constant) dominate in the flat Universe. The nature of the dark matter constituents cannot be determined till they are directly…
Detecting dark matter as it streams through detectors on Earth relies on knowledge of its phase space density on a scale comparable to the size of our solar system. Numerical simulations predict that our Galactic halo contains an enormous…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are among the best-motivated dark matter candidates. In the standard scenario where the freeze-out occurs well after the end of inflationary reheating, they are in tension with the severe…
Despite the compelling amount of evidence for the existence of dark matter, its exact nature is still one of the main open questions in modern physics. A great experimental effort has been performed to probe one of the most popular dark…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are one of the leading candidates for Dark Matter. Currently, the most promising method to detect WIMPs is the direct detection of the recoil energy deposited in a low-background laboratory…
Supersymmetric models with low electroweak fine-tuning contain light higgsinos with mass not too far from m_h\simeq 125 GeV, while other sparticles can be much heavier. In the R-parity conserving MSSM, the lightest neutralino is then a…
In the early 1990's, an analysis was completed by several theorists of the available mass/cross-section parameter space for unusual particle candidates to solve the dark matter problem, e.g. strongly interacting massive particles (SIMPs).…
We investigate benchmark scenarios for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that naturally evade current direct detection constraints by featuring suppressed spin-independent cross-sections. Focusing on three representative models,…
Assuming that cosmological dark matter consists of weakly interacting massive particles, we use the recent precise measurement of cosmological parameters to predict the guaranteed rates of production of such particles in association with…
In anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB) models, superpartner masses are proportional to couplings squared. Their hidden sectors therefore naturally contain WIMPless dark matter, particles whose thermal relic abundance is…
Dark matter could be a thermal relic comprised of strongly interacting massive particles (SIMPs), where $3 \rightarrow 2$ interactions set the relic abundance. Such interactions generically arise in theories of chiral symmetry breaking via…
Possible hints for WIMP dark matter with mass around 10 GeV coming from the DAMA, CoGeNT, and maybe also CRESST experiments are presented, and confronted with constraints from CDMS and XENON data. Focusing on spin-independent (SI)…
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…
In the framework of Left-Right symmetric model, we investigate an interesting scenario, in which the so-called VEV seesaw problem can be naturally solved with Z_2 symmetry. In such a scenario, we find a pair of stable weakly interacting…
We propose a new thermal freeze-out mechanism for ultra-heavy dark matter. Dark matter coannihilates with a lighter unstable species, leading to an annihilation rate that is exponentially enhanced relative to standard WIMPs. This scenario…
We explore the production of thermal dark matter (DM) candidates (WIMPs, SIMPs, ELDERs and Cannibals) during cosmic reheating. Assuming a general parametrization for the scaling of the inflaton energy density and the standard model (SM)…
A feebly interacting massive particle (FIMP), contrasting with a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), is an intriguing dark matter (DM) candidate. Light (keV-scale) FIMP DM is of particular interest: its radiative decay leaves a line…
We explore the idea of an alternative candidate for particle dark matter namely Feebly Interacting Massive Particle (FIMP) in the framework of a two component singlet scalar model. Singlet scalar dark matter has already been demonstrated to…
We present a new method for determining Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) properties in future tonne scale direct detection experiments which accounts for uncertainties in the Milky Way (MW) smooth dark matter distribution. Using…