Summary of DARK 2002: 4th International Heidelberg
Conference on Dark Matter in Astro and Particle Physics, 4-9 Feb 2002,
Cape Town, South Africa. Report-no: CERN-TH/2002-074
For a PDF version of the article, click
here.
astro-ph/0204059.
For a Postscript version of the article, click
here.
Abstract. Salient aspects of the meeting are summarized, including our knowledge of dark matter at different cosmological and astrophysical distance scales, ranging from large-scale structure to the cores of galaxies, and our speculations on particle candidates for dark matter, including neutrinos, neutralinos, axinos, gravitinos and cryptons. Comments are also made on prospects for detecting dark matter particles and on the dark energy problem.
The speakers at this conference have come from different backgrounds, from that of macrophysics - namely astrophysics and cosmology, and from that of microphysics - namely that of particle physics experiments and theory. We have come together to discuss a weighty subject, namely the nature of most of the stuff in the Universe. In this brief summary, I shall not be able to do justice to all the interesting talks we have heard, and I apologize in advance to those whose work is unjustifiably underemphasized. Inevitably, my summary adopts personal points of view, that you may not share.
This talk is ordered according to a sequence of decreasing distance scales, from the overall size of the Universe at ~ 1010 pc down to the Planck length of 10-33 cm ~ 10-52 pc. Astrophysical scales that we meet along the way include the ~ 108 pc of clusters of galaxies, the ~ 105 pc of galactic haloes, the ~ 103 pc of the cusps of rotation curves, and the ~ 1 pc of the central region of the Milky Way. Among the distance scales of particle-physics experiments that we meet are the ~ 10-6 pc traveled by solar neutrinos, the ~ 10-10 pc travelled by atmospheric neutrinos, the ~ 10-12 pc of long-baseline neutrino experiments, and the ~ 10-13 pc size of the LHC accelerator. Typical particle sizes we meet include the Compton wavelength ~ 10-22 pc of the neutrino, the Compton wavelength ~ 10-36 pc of supersymmetric particles, and the characteristic wavelength ~ 10-44 pc of the ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
Somewhere along this trail, the puzzle of dark matter will surely be solved, even if we do not yet know where.
Table of Contents