Non-WIMP Candidates

Abstract

Non-WIMP dark matter candidates include particles motivated by minimality, candidates motivated by experimental anomalies, and exotic possibilities motivated primarily by the desire of clever iconoclasts to highlight how truly ignorant we are about the nature of dark matter. In this review, I discuss candidates that are not WIMPs, but nevertheless share the same theoretical motivations as WIMPs and also naturally have the correct relic density. There are two classes: superWIMP dark matter, where the desired relic density is inherited through decays, and WIMPless dark matter, where the dark matter's mass and couplings scale together to maintain the desired thermal relic density.

20 pages, published as Chapter 10, pp. 190-204, in Particle Dark Matter: Observations, Models and Searches, edited by Gianfranco Bertone (Cambridge University Press, 2010), available at http://cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521763684