Paper detail

Cosmology and the Dark Matter Frontier

A brief overview is given about some issues in current astroparticle physics, focusing on the dark matter (DM) problem, where the connection to LHC physics is particularly strong. New data from the Planck satellite has made the evidence in favour of the existence of DM even stronger. The favourite, though not the only, candidates for cosmological DM, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), are being probed by a variety of experiments - direct detection through scattering in terrestrial detectors, indirect detection by observing products of annihilation of DM in the Galaxy, and finally searches at accelerators such as the LHC. The field is in the interesting situation that all of these search methods are reaching sensitivities where signals of DM may plausibly soon be found, and a vast array of models will be probed in the next few years. Of course, expectations for a positive signature are high, which calls for caution regarding 'false alarms'. Some of the presently puzzling and partly conflicting pieces of evidence for DM detection are discussed as well as expectations for the future.