2017/12/26 by L. Baudis, Laura Baudis · 1 voice · 47 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Galaxy #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Theoretical physics #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s1062798717000783
published in European Review 26(1), 70-81 (Cambridge University Press) · 11 pages, invited article for the European Review
openalex publication_date 2017/12/26 · arxiv created 2018/01/24 · arxiv published 2018/01/24 · arxiv updated 2018/01/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The dark matter problem is almost a century old. Since the 1930s evidence has been growing that our cosmos is dominated by a new form of non-baryonic matter that holds galaxies and clusters together and influences cosmic structures up to the largest observed scales. At the microscopic level, we still do not know the composition of this dark, or invisible, matter, which does not interact directly with light. The simplest assumption is that it is made of new particles that interact with gravity and, at most, weakly with known elementary particles. I will discuss searches for such new particles, both space- and Earth-bound, including those experiments placed in deep underground laboratories. While a dark matter particle has not yet been identified, even after decades of concerted efforts, new technological developments and experiments have reached sensitivities where a discovery might be imminent, albeit certainly not guaranteed.