Dark matter and background light

By J. Overduin, P. Wesson. 2004

207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract 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 are inconsistent with anything in the existing standard model of particle physics, and it appears that the latter must be extended. We review what is known about dark matter and energy from their impact on the light of the night sky. Most of the candidates that have been proposed so far are not perfectly black, but decay into or otherwise interact with photons in characteristic ways that can be accurately modelled and compared with observational data. We show how experimental limits on the intensity of cosmic background radiation in the microwave, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X-ray and γ -ray bands put strong limits on decaying vacuum energy, light axions, neutrinos, unstable weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and objects like black holes. Our conclusion is that the dark matter is most likely to be WIMPs if conventional cosmology holds; or higher-dimensional sources if spacetime needs to be extended.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42f2900390d1d1b184b17df2176ba0ff24866b3f

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmological bounds on pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons (2011, result): “We have thus compared the resulting spectrum with the extragalactic background light (EBL) spectrum we have found in the review by Overduin and Wesson [38], reproduced in Fig.”
Evolution of cosmological perturbations in Bose–Einstein condensate dark matter (2011, background): “There are many possible candidates for dark matter, the most popular ones being the axions and the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) (for a review of the particle physics aspects of dark matter see Overduin & Wesson (2004)).”
Growth of perturbations in an expanding universe with Bose-Einstein condensate dark matter (2011, background): “…grand unified theories in particle physics predict the existence of various exotic bosons (e.g. axions, scalar neutrinos, neutralinos) that should be present in considerable abundance in the universe and comprise (part of) the cosmological missing mass (Primack et al. 1998, Overduin & Wesson 2004).”
Generalized Curvature-Matter Couplings in Modified Gravity (2014, background): “Many possible candidates for dark matter have been proposed, the most popular ones being the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) (for a review of the particle physics aspects of dark matter, see [150]).”