Breakthroughs on the Dark Matter Issue

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in understanding dark matter, focusing on cosmological data, models with a positive cosmological constant, and supersymmetric quintessence models with negative pressure.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent dark matter models, including the integration of quintessence within supersymmetric theories, and discusses implications of new cosmological observations.

Findings

Recent cosmological data favor models with a positive cosmological constant.

Supersymmetric theories can incorporate dynamical dark energy through quintessence.

Dark matter models beyond cold dark matter are crucial for understanding universe evolution.

Abstract

Last year observations had a profound impact on our views on the amount and nature of dark matter in the universe. We give a brief review of the recent history of dark matter models beyond the pure cold dark matter universe. In view of the most recent cosmological data, we then go on to discuss models with a positive cosmological constant. Finally we explicitly analyse a class of particle physics models for a dynamical cosmological component with negative pressure (``quintessence''), in the context of supersymmetric theories.