Indirect and direct search for dark matter

Abstract

The majority of the matter in the universe is still unidentified and under investigation by both direct and indirect means. Many experiments searching for the recoil of dark-matter particles off target nuclei in underground laboratories have established increasingly strong constraints on the mass and scattering cross sections of weakly interacting particles, and some have even seen hints at a possible signal. Other experiments search for a possible mixing of photons with light scalar or pseudo-scalar particles that could also constitute dark matter. Furthermore, annihilation or decay of dark matter can contribute to charged cosmic rays, photons at all energies, and neutrinos. Many existing and future ground-based and satellite experiments are sensitive to such signals. Finally, data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are scrutinized for missing energy as a signature of new weakly interacting particles that may be related to dark matter. In this review article we summarize the status of the field with an emphasis on the complementarity between direct detection in dedicated laboratory experiments, indirect detection in the cosmic radiation, and searches at particle accelerators.Comment: 74 pages, 27 figures, to be published in "Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics" 201

Interaction between bosonic dark matter and stars

“…The evidence for DM in observations is overwhelming, starting with galaxy rotation curves, gravitational lensing and the cosmic microwave background [2]. While carefully concocted modified theories of gravity can perhaps explain almost all observations, the most attractive and accepted explanation lies in DM being composed mostly of cold, collisionless particles [2][3][4].…”

“…Several candidates for dark matter have been proposed [2][3][4], of which ultralight bosonic fields, such as axions, axion-like candidates [5][6][7] or "hidden photons" [8] are an attractive possibility. Axions were originally devised to solve the strong-CP problem, but recently a plethora of other, even lighter fields with masses 10 −10 −10 −33 eV/c 2 , have also become an interesting possibility, in what is commonly known as the axiverse scenario [9].…”

Hidden spin-3/2 field in the standard model

“…The negative searches [42][43][44] so far have added one more feature: The DM must have exceedingly suppressed interactions with the SM matter. It is not hard to see that the spin-3/2 fermion ψ μ possesses all these properties.…”

Revealing modified gravity signals in matter and halo hierarchical clustering

“…While the observational evidence for dark matter's existence is overwhelming, with the general consensus being that the last piece of this puzzle is still missing due to difficulties related to hunting for the DM particle in Earth-based laboratories like CERN and Fermilab [12][13][14], the conceptual and theoretical problems related to DE are of a much more profound nature. One of the core assumptions of LCDM is that General Relativity (GR) is an adequate description of gravity on all cosmic scales, from the size of the Solar System (∼AU) to the scale of particle horizon (∼ Gpcs).…”