Dark Matter Candidates from Particle Physics and Methods of Detection

By Jonathan L. Feng. 2010

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The identity of dark matter is a question of central importance in both astrophysics and particle physics. In the past, the leading particle candidates were cold and collisionless, and typically predicted missing energy signals at particle colliders. However, recent progress has greatly expanded the list of well-motivated candidates and the possible signatures of dark matter. This review begins with a brief summary of the standard model of particle physics and its outstanding problems. I then discuss several dark matter candidates motivated by these problems, including weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), superWIMPs, light gravitinos, hidden dark matter, sterile neutrinos, and axions. For each of these, I critically examine the particle physics motivations and present their expected production mechanisms, basic properties, and implications for direct and indirect detection, particle colliders, and astrophysical observations. Upcoming experiments will discover or exclude many of these candidates, and progress may open up an era of unprecedented synergy between studies of the largest and smallest observable length scales.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/459d0b902729296d13b8e724743baebf25477f4e

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Citations in the corpus

FERMI-LAT OBSERVATIONS OF HIGH-ENERGY γ-RAY EMISSION TOWARD THE GALACTIC CENTER (2015, background): “…of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK 41 Science Institute, University of Iceland, IS-107 Reykjavik, Iceland 42 Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, University of weakly-interacting particles (see the reviews by, e.g., Jungman et al. 1996; Bergström 2000; Feng 2010).”
EXPERIMENTAL LIMITS ON PRIMORDIAL BLACK HOLE DARK MATTER FROM THE FIRST 2 YR OF KEPLER DATA (2013, background): “Besides the thousands of theoretical papers on supersymmetric (SUSY) weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) candidates, there have been many experimental searches for these DM candidates (Feng 2010).”
PRISM (Polarized Radiation Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission): an extended white paper (2013, background): “rse particle physics (e.g., dark matter in excited states [74,176] and Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilations close to resonance [85]), with many natural particle candidates found in supersymmetric models [72,73]. 7.4 Metals during the dark ages Any scattering of CMB photons after recombination blurs CMB”
Naturalness and the Status of Supersymmetry (2013, background): “Of course, dark matter may be composed of other particles, such as axions, sterile neutrinos, hidden sector dark matter, or gravitinos [47].”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, background): “…the Standard Model of particle physics that can explain the observed baryon asymmetry and why neutrino masses are so small compared to other fermions, are two other hypothetical particles that may be dark matter (among a veritable zoo of additional possibilities; see Feng 2010 for a recent review).”
Neutrino non-standard interactions: A status report (2019, background): “Among the many candidates to be the DM, the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) paradigm has been extensively studied and tested by several experiments [120].”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “While many experiments have searched for signals of particle dark matter using a variety of traditional particle physics techniques [7, 8, 9] (e.”
Dark Matter Searches with Astroparticle Data (2011, methodology): “(See Feng (2010) for a recent review of some other candidate particles.)”
Core Cosmology Library: Precision Cosmological Predictions for LSST (2018, background): “These data will also allow us to shed light on a number of open questions in fundamental physics, such as the nature of dark matter (Feng 2010; Porter et al. 2011), the mass of neutrinos (Wong 2011; Lesgourgues & Pastor 2012a; Allison et al. 2015) or the level of primordial non-Gaussianity (Dalal…”