# Dark matter and dark energy references

I've been looking for questions about dark matter, and I've read some very interesting answers. However, I desire too look into it deeply.

This is not actually a question. I'm asking the community to recommend interesting references to understanding dark matter and dark energy.

I accept all sort of references: notes, books, scientific papers etc.

Let us assume some background on classical physics, thermodynamics and basics about quantum theory.

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Someone flagged this as a list-question, which should be closed. Since it belongs to books, I kept it open for now. –  Qmechanic Dec 23 '12 at 22:29

My area of research is (related to) large scale structure and substructure of dark matter. Not sure if you're interested more in the question of "what is dark matter" (from more of a particle physics point of view) or "what do we know about how dark matter is distributed and its gravitational interactions" (a more astronomy point of view). This answer leans more toward the second one. I won't even touch dark energy, I'm sure someone else can do better than I.

Sadly I don't know a great textbook on dark matter, or even with a big section on the topic. This is probably because dark matter/energy are not solved problems, so they're discussed more in periodicals than in texts. Yes there are textbooks, I just haven't read one that I've found fantastic.

Here's my pick of some papers on dark matter. Some are classics, some are recent, all are highly cited. Yes, they're all extremely technical. At an introductory level I don't suggest reading them all front to back and trying to understand everything; have a skim, try and understand the main results, read again in more detail if you find it interesting. Ask more specific questions as you come across them.

If you find yourself stuck behind a paywall trying to use any of the links on the pages linked below, use the arXiv link instead.

THE must see observational dark matter paper (and even at only a couple of pages long, it packs a punch). The bullet cluster is considered the "smoking gun" of dark matter existence, and pictures of it have adorned the introductory slides of dark matter talks for years. People still debate alternate explanations of the observation, but mostly the consensus is that this proves DM.

Before the bullet cluster, spiral galaxy rotation curves were some of the strongest evidence for DM. Reading the Wikipedia article is a decent primer for the paper.

Another observation that backs up the DM model is the "Lyman-$\alpha$ forest". The absorption of distant quasar emission by hydrogen clouds at many redshifts gives a "forest" of absorption lines which can be used to map the distribution of matter between us and the quasar. This can be checked against DM models, and seems to give generally good agreement.

The classic paper on the internal structure of dark matter clumps or "haloes" describes the NFW (Navarro-Frenk-White) density profile (equation 3). It turns out this result isn't quite exact and needs some corrections, and there's a long debate about whether the centres of haloes are "cusps" or "cores", but in the grand scheme of things the results of NFW96 are still widely used.

Simulations of DM can also be great fun. My two picks are Millenium and Bolshoi (these have some cousins; Millenium has Millenium-XXL, Millenium-II, MiniMillenium, Aquarius, and Bolshoi has BigBolshoi/Multidark and ViaLactea; essentially same people, same codes, different resolution/volume/focus). People have done many things with the results of these simulations, but the first result is just the organization, evolution and properties of the DM density field. Plus there are some very nice pictures and movies and more pictures and movies of the outputs.

The particle nature of DM is not my area of expertise, but this is the best-known recent-ish review I could find. 8 years old mind you, so there's been lots of activity in this field since. I'll leave it to someone else to point out the best references on the latest results.

Ok I lied, this last paper is not particularly well known. I just happen to work down the hall from one of the authors so I've heard lots about it, and the others are well known/respected so I think it carries some weight. They make some predictions about the $\gamma$-ray signal they would expect for a particular model of self-interacting dark matter (the maps on p. 12 / journal p. 604 are pretty cool). Still an area of ongoing research, I just think it's interesting so I threw it in here.

Hope you found some of those interesting/enjoyable. If you have any questions, just ask (comment or new question as appropriate).

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Huh realized just now that this question is a couple of years old. Oh well, I think I added some alternatives to the existing answers anyway. –  Kyle Oman Jul 16 '13 at 15:34

I'll give links to the three lectures by Kolb given at CERN:

Good introductory lectures. Also quite entertaining.

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Thanks for these links –  Serg Sep 28 '12 at 14:09

found in the net:

Dark Energy : Theory and Observations, 491 pages by Luca Amendola and Shinji Tsujikawa

Dark Sky, Dark matter, 216 pages by J M Overduin ans P P Wesson

Does Dark Energy really exist ?, 9 pages by Thimoty Clifton and Pedro G Ferreira (... explanation: that our galaxy lies at the center of a giant cosmic void...)

No DE, an artifact of our measuring (a Chimera) : A relativistic time variation of matter/space fits both local and cosmic data, 14 pages by Alfredo Gouveia Oliveira and Rodrigo de Abreu

Good Luck

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I have a bachelor's in mathematics but I'm really interested in this topic. Do you have any advise concerning a strategy to understand the topic? What do I have to study first? –  deps_stats Feb 28 '11 at 20:10
coded here: outrafisica.blogs.sapo.pt/2008/12 , read the 14 pages, enjoy the nice story of the universe from 'other' perspective outrafisica.blogs.sapo.pt (google reader and translator) from first to last. –  Helder Velez Feb 28 '11 at 23:44
Off course to see it from other side (No DE) we first need other model as I pointed (14 pages never discussed). Then we need to know how to say no to the 491 pages. This step is longer to accomplish. It is need to know a bit about nuclear physics and to know what the measures mean. Understand how atoms can vary in a self-similar universe and how this influence the outcome. The Cosmological Constant: when Einstein wrote GR everyone presumed that the Univ was infinite in age and, beeing so, light had time to go attractive in one way and repulsive in the 'returns' in a closed univ. –  Helder Velez Mar 1 '11 at 0:18

The Wikipedia article on dark matter is an okay overview of the reasons astronomers believe that dark matter exists. This isn't my field, but I found most of it understandable. Some of it was a bit too terse and jargon-filled. One paper Wikipedia links to is a review on the arXiv. You may also try searching the arXiv for dark matter reviews, and try to track down anything they reference. It appears that astro-ph is the place to go for dark matter papers, but a simple search gave me a huge number of references with no obvious way to sort through them.

EDIT: This is such a basic thing for astronomy and cosmology that I would expect intro textbooks to at least give enough information to help you find more. But I'm so far afield of this that I don't even know what the standard textbooks are.

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You can follow the book "Particle and Astroparticle Physics by Utpal Sarkar,Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Pg-461".

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## protected by Qmechanic♦Jul 16 '13 at 14:14

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