Dark Matter: A Brief Review

TL;DR

This review discusses the current understanding of dark matter, its potential particle candidates, recent experimental constraints, and advocates for renewed astronomical approaches to identify its nature.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of dark matter candidates, summarizes recent experimental results, and suggests a shift back to astronomical methods for dark matter identification.

Findings

Dark matter constitutes about 23% of the universe's mass.

Recent experiments have not detected dark matter particles.

Astronomy can play a key role in future dark matter research.

Abstract

From astronomical observations, we know that dark matter exists, makes up 23% of the mass budget of the Universe, clusters strongly to form the load-bearing frame of structure for galaxy formation, and hardly interacts with ordinary matter except gravitationally. However, this information is not enough to identify the particle specie(s) that make up dark matter. As such, the problem of determining the identity of dark matter has largely shifted to the fields of astroparticle and particle physics. In this talk, I will review the current status of the search for the nature of dark matter. I will provide an introduction to possible particle candidates for dark matter and highlight recent experimental astroparticle- and particle-physics results that constrain the properties of those candidates. Given the absence of detections in those experiments, I will advocate a return of the problem of dark-matter identification to astronomy, and show what kinds of theoretical and observational work might be used to pin down the nature of dark matter once and for all. This talk is intended for a broad astronomy audience.