Phases of Particle Dark Matter

Dark matter is believed to make up most of the matter of our Universe, but its particle origin remains a mystery. A favorite candidate is the so-called Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), but a diverse set of experiments are rapidly closing the available parameter space for WIMPs. I will show that small changes to the assumptions about how dark matter was produced in the early Universe lead to very different dark matter masses and experimental prospects. I will also describe how the recent tentative detection of cosmological 21cm absorption may be a sign of an exotic population of soft photons, which could have been produced by dark matter.

Speaker: Josh Ruderman, New York University