Dark Matter at the Fermi Scale

Abstract

Recent breakthroughs in cosmology reveal that a quarter of the Universe is composed of dark matter, but the microscopic identity of dark matter remains a deep mystery. I review recent progress in resolving this puzzle, focusing on two well-motivated classes of dark matter candidates: WIMPs and superWIMPs. These possibilities have similar motivations: they exist in the same well-motivated particle physics models, the observed dark matter relic density emerges naturally, and dark matter particles have mass around 100 GeV, the energy scale identified as interesting over 70 years ago by Fermi. At the same time, they have widely varying implications for direct and indirect dark matter searches, particle colliders, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background, and halo profiles and structure formation. If WIMPs or superWIMPs are a significant component of dark matter, we will soon be entering a golden era in which dark matter will be studied through diverse probes at the interface of particle physics, astroparticle physics, and cosmology. I outline a program of dark matter studies for each of these scenarios, and discuss the prospects for identifying dark matter in the coming years.

29 pages, invited review to appear in J. Phys. G

References in corpus (17)

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• DarkSUSY: Computing Supersymmetric Dark Matter Properties Numerically
• Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis and Hadronic Decay of Long-Lived Massive Particles
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• SuperWIMP Solutions to Small Scale Structure Problems
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• Slepton Trapping at the Large Hadron and International Linear Colliders
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• Requirements on collider data to match the precision of WMAP on supersymmetric dark matter
• Slepton Production at e+e- and e-e- Linear Colliders
• A Running Spectral Index in Supersymmetric Dark-Matter Models with Quasi-Stable Charged Particles
• Prospects for Sparticle Discovery in Variants of the MSSM
• Probing Gravitational Interactions of Elementary Particles
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Cited by in corpus (13)

• The Hunt for New Physics at the Large Hadron Collider
• Bulk Viscosity, Decaying Dark Matter, and the Cosmic Acceleration
• Cosmology: small scale issues revisited
• In Search for Extraterrestrial High Energy Neutrinos
• Late Decaying Dark Matter, Bulk Viscosity and the Cosmic Acceleration
• Supersymmetry and Vector-like Extra Generation
• Observing Dark Matter via the Gyromagnetic Faraday Effect
• "Evaporation" of a flavor-mixed particle from a gravitational potential
• Gravitino Dark Matter with Weak-Scale Right-Handed Sneutrino
• Physics at International Linear Collider (ILC)
• Dark Matter and Gauge Coupling Unification in A Supersymmetry Model with Vector-like Matter
• Collider Physics and Cosmology
• Constraining the mSUGRA parameter space using the entropy of dark matter halos