Susan Gardner

Dark Matter in a Weakly Coupled Universe

The LHC may have discovered the Higgs boson of the standard model,
giving, seemingly, mass to the matter we know in a perturbatively
calculable context up to very
high energy scales. In contrast, dark matter, whatever it may be, is not
part of that picture,
though its energy fraction in the cosmos today
exceeds that of ordinary matter by a factor of a few. It is nevertheless
still
possible that baryonic matter and dark matter have a hidden common origin,
so that dark matter would possess a cosmic particle–antiparticle asymmetry
just as baryons do. I will describe some of the theoretical possibilities,
as well
as some observational and experimental tests, which include studies of the
Faraday rotation of light upon its passage through dark matter.

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