The search for dark matter heats up

Every year, the Dutch physics community gets together to celebrate the year in physics. These are some highlights from the meeting.Since it's a meeting, it's not possible to link to published work (a talk could cover multiple papers, or just parts of papers). Where possible, We've linked to the research group that presented the work.

This year, the search for dark matter seems to be dominating the minds of a lot of physicists. It's quite an intriguing issue. We have a lot of gravitational evidence for dark matter at length scales from single galaxies to galaxy clusters—and even the cosmic microwave background. The variety of evidence is such that it's difficult to imagine a suitable modification to the laws of gravitation that would satisfy all these constraints.

But actual dark matter remains elusive. I’ll discuss some details in a moment, but my take-home from the dark matter talks is that if it can be detected at all, we should see it relatively soon.