Les Houches Summer School Lecture Notes

Dark Matter (DM) is the substance that fills about 26% of the total matter-energy budget of the Universe and that accounts for about 80% of the total matter. While the evidences of its existence are numerous and compelling, its real nature is still a mystery and a subject of intense research.

By its very nature the topic lies at the intersection of different research fields. DM is obviously a problem of astrophysics and cosmology, but the solution could possibly come from fundamental particle physics, which could provide the new elementary particle that is the DM. For this reason, a coordinated approach among different disciplines is crucial to achieve progress.

This School aims to train the next generation of students and young researchers in the field with two main guidelines in mind: 1) starting from the basics, without taking for granted any theoretical (or experimental) prejudice on the nature of the problem of DM; 2) making the most of the interdisciplinarity of the topic, approaching it from the cosmological, astrophysical and particle physics points of view via the participation of experts/lecturers from different fields.

Organizers

• Marco Cirelli (LPTHE CNRS & Sorbonne U, Paris, France)
• Babette Döbrich (CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
• Jure ZUPAN (Cincinnati University, OH, USA)

Lecturers

• Anne Green (Nottingham) DM in cosmology
• Joshua Ruderman (NYU) DM Production
• Tracy Slatyer (MIT) DM Indirect Detection: from KeV to multi TeV
• Philip Harris (MIT) DM at accelerators
• Igor Irastorza (Zaragoza) Axion Dark Matter (including theory and experiments)
• Jonathan Feng (UC Irvine) Standard WIMPs
• Jody Cooley (SMU Texas) Direct Detection of classical WIMPs
• Joachim Brod (Cincinnati) DM Effective Field Theories
• Justin Khoury (U Penn) Modified gravity for DM and alternatives to particle DM
• Clare Burrage (Nottingham) Connection between DM and DE and extended gravity
• Bernard Carr (Queen Mary London) and Florian Kühnel (LMU Munich) Primordial Black Holes as DM candidates
• Lam Hui (Columbia) 'Fuzzy' ultralight Dark Matter
• Surjeet Rajendran (JHU) New avenues in experimental searches for DM
• Yonit Hochberg (Hebrew U Jerusalem) SIMPs
• Tongyan Lin (UCSD) Sub-GeV Dark Matter
• Joachim Kopp (CERN) Sterile Neutrinos
• Jim Cline (McGill) Dark atoms, composite dark states