The Nature of Dark Matter

Abstract

Cold Dark Matter (CDM) has become the standard modern theory of cosmological structure formation. Its predictions appear to be in good agreement with data on large scales, and it naturally accounts for many properties of galaxies. But despite its many successes, there has been concern about CDM on small scales because of the possible contradiction between the linearly rising rotation curves observed in some dark-matter-dominated galaxies vs. the $1/r$ density cusps at the centers of simulated CDM halos. Other CDM issues on small scales include the very large number of small satellite halos in simulations, far more than the number of small galaxies observed locally, and problems concerning the angular momentum of the baryons in dark matter halos. The latest data and simulations have lessened, although not entirely resolved, these concerns. Meanwhile, the main alternatives to CDM that have been considered to solve these problems, self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) and warm dark matter (WDM), have been found to have serious drawbacks.