Download or read book Constraining the Particle Nature of Dark Matter written by Gregory Daniel Mack and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Dark matter is one of the greatest mysteries of modern astrophysics. It comprises about 83% of the matter density in the Universe and approximately 22% of the total energy density, yet its identity and particle properties are unknown. Gravitational interactions reveal its presence, but it does not readily interact with light or normal matter. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide insight into the particle properties of this exotic type of matter in a model-independent fashion. Dark matter is expected to be its own antiparticle, but the strength of its self-annihilation is not known. It is often assumed to be consistent with that which gives the correct abundance if dark matter were produced as a thermal relic in the early Universe, but that has not been proven. Constraints on the dark matter self-annihilation cross section are found over a wide range of masses, both for the separate cases of monoenergetic neutrino and monoenergetic photon production, and the corresponding limits on the total self-annihilation cross section. This is done by comparing the theoretical flux from a region of annihilating dark matter to observational data of that region. While larger than the thermal relic value, the resulting upper bounds are surprisingly stringent and among the first model-independent limits of their kind. A specific application of residual dark matter annihilations during the time of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is analyzed, adding a lower limit to the value of the annihilation cross section for a certain mass range to couple with the calculated upper bounds mentioned above. The interaction strength of dark matter with normal matter is constrained by the case of dark matter capture in Earth and the resulting heat flow from annihilation in the core. When compared to observation, the analysis rules out many possible interaction strengths between dark matter and normal matter, showing that the interaction, as measured by the interaction cross section, must be truly weak for the usually considered mass range. These model-independent investigations help to shrink the range of possible dark matter property values in a generic fashion, aiding in better understanding and more focused analyses.