Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 2, MT19)

The existence of Dark Matter - matter that is unaccounted for by the Standard Model of particle physics - is supported by a staggering quantity and variety of astrophysical observations. A plethora of Dark Matter candidates have been proposed. Dark Matter may be cold, warm or fuzzy. It may be composed of right-handed neutrinos, supersymmetric particles, axions or primordial black holes. I will give an overview of Dark Matter candidates and how we can understand the phenomenological differences between them in the framework of quantum theory. I will discuss the difficulties faced by modified gravity theories in explaining our observations, and their relation to Dark Matter.