Related papers: Particle Dark Matter
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…
Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) direct detection experiments are just reaching the sensitivity required to detect Galactic dark matter in the form of neutralinos (or indeed any stable weakly interacting particle). Detection…
The problems of simple elementary weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) appeal to extend the physical basis for nonbaryonic dark matter. Such extension involves more sophisticated dark matter candidates from physics beyond the…
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…
Dark matter constitutes one of the most intriguing but so far unresolved issues in physics today. In many extensions of the Standard Model the existence of a stable Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) is predicted. The WIMP is an…
An overview is given of various dark matter candidates. Among the many suggestions given in the literature, axions, inert Higgs doublet, sterile neutrinos, supersymmetric particles and Kaluza-Klein particles are discussed. The situation has…
For many working in particle physics and cosmology successful discovery and characterisation of the new particles that most likely explain the non-baryonic cold dark matter, known to comprise the majority of matter in the Universe, would be…
This article gives an overview on the status of experimental searches for dark matter at the end of 2014. The main focus is on direct searches for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) using underground-based low-background…
We review various issues related to the direct detection of constituents of dark matter, which are assumed to be Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). We specifically consider heavy WIMPs such as: 1) The lightest supersymmetric…
After a short introduction on particle candidates for dark matter within possible extensions of the standard model, we concentrate on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, and on one of their most interesting physical realizations: the…
A weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP) is perhaps the most promising candidate for the dark matter in the Galactic halo. The WIMP detection rate in laboratory searches is fixed by the cross section for elastic WIMP-nucleus scattering.…
An ever-increasing body of evidence suggests that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) constitute the bulk of the matter in the Universe. We illustrate how experimental data, dimensional analysis and Standard Model particle physics…
We describe two natural scenarios in which both dark matter WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) and a variety of supersymmetric partners should be discovered in the foreseeable future. In the first scenario, the WIMPs are…
Direct searches for dark matter lead to serious problems for simple models with stable neutral Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) as candidates for dark matter. A possibility is discussed that new stable quarks and charged leptons…
These lectures on non-baryonic dark matter matter are divided into two parts. In the first part, I discuss the need for non-baryonic dark matter in light of recent results in cosmology, and I present some of the most popular candidates for…
We investigate a new class of dark matter: superweakly-interacting massive particles (superWIMPs). As with conventional WIMPs, superWIMPs appear in well-motivated particle theories with naturally the correct relic density. In contrast to…
SuperWeakly-Interacting Massive Particles (superWIMPs) produced in the late decays of other particles are well-motivated dark matter candidates and may be favored over standard Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) by small scale…
We discuss the hypothesis that the constituents of dark matter in the galactic halo are Primordial Intermediate-Mass Black Holes (PIMBHs). The status of axions and WIMPs is discussed, as are the methods for detecting PIMBHs with emphasis on…
Astrophysical observations indicate that about 23% of the energy density of the universe is in the form of non-baryonic particles beyond the standard model of particle physics. One exciting and well motivated candidate is the lightest…
WIMPs, weakly-interacting massive particles, have been leading candidates for particle dark matter for decades, and they remain a viable and highly motivated possibility. In these lectures, I describe the basic motivations for WIMPs,…