Candidates for non-baryonic dark matter

This report is a brief review of the efforts to explain the nature of non-baryonic dark matter and of the studies devoted to the search for relic particles. Among the different dark matter candidates, special attention is devoted to relic neutralinos, by giving an overview of the recent calculations of its relic abundance and detection rates in a wide variety of supersymmetric schemes.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, typeset with ReVTeX, uses espcrc2.sty. Invited review talk presented at "Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP 2001)" Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Italy, September 8-12, 2001. References added. The paper may also be downloaded from http://www.to.infn.it/~fornengo/proceedings/taup01.ps.g

Particle dark matter searches in the anisotropic sky

Anisotropies in the electromagnetic emission produced by dark matter annihilation or decay in the extragalactic sky are a recent tool in the quest for a particle dark matter evidence. We review the formalism to compute the two-point angular power spectrum in the halo-model approach and discuss the features and the relative size of the various auto- and cross-correlation signals that can be envisaged for anisotropy studies. From the side of particle dark matter signals, we consider the full multi-wavelength spectrum, from the radio emission to X-ray and gamma-ray productions. We discuss the angular power spectra of the auto-correlation of each of these signals and of the cross-correlation between any pair of them. We then extend the search to comprise specific gravitational tracers of dark matter distribution in the Universe: weak-lensing cosmic shear, large-scale-structure matter distribution and CMB-lensing. We have shown that cross-correlating a multi-wavelength dark matter signal (which is a direct manifestation of its particle physics nature) with a gravitational tracer (which is a manifestation of the presence of large amounts of unseen matter in the Universe) may offer a promising tool to demonstrate that what we call dark matter is indeed formed by elementary particles.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures. Prepared as inaugural article for Frontiers in High-Energy and Astroparticle Physics. v2: few comments added, to appear in Frontiers (Hypothesis and Theory Article

Astroparticle physics view on supersymmetry

The particle physics interpretation of the missing-mass, or darkmatter, problem of cosmological and astrophysical nature is going to be posed under deep scrutiny in the next years. From the particle physics side, accelerator physics will deeply test theoretical ideas of new physics beyond the Standard Model, where a particle physics candidate to dark matter is often naturally obtained. From the astrophysical side, many probes are already providing a great deal of independent information on the signals which can be produced by the galactic or extra-galactic dark matter. The ultimate hope is in fact to be able to disentangle a dark matter signal from the various sources of backgrounds and to extract a coherent picture of new physics from the accelerator physics, astrophysics and cosmology side. A very ambitious and far-reaching project, indeed

Prospects to verify a possible dark matter hint in cosmic antiprotons with antideuterons and antihelium

Cosmic rays are an important tool to study dark matter annihilation in our Galaxy. Recently, a possible hint for dark matter annihilation was found in the antiproton spectrum measured by AMS-02, even though the result might be affected by theoretical uncertainties. A complementary way to test its dark matter interpretation would be the observation of low-energy antinuclei in cosmic rays. We determine the chances to observe antideuterons with GAPS and AMS-02, and the implications for the ongoing AMS-02 antihelium searches. We find that the corresponding antideuteron signal is within the GAPS and AMS-02 detection potential. If, more conservatively, the putative signal was considered as an upper limit on DM annihilation, our results would indicate the highest possible fluxes for antideuterons and antihelium compatible with current antiproton data.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, matches published versio

Light neutralino dark matter in gaugino non-universal models

We discuss the cosmology and the astrophysical signals produced by light- neutralino dark matter in the frame of an effective MSSM model without gaugino-mass unification at a grand unification scale