New Approaches to Uncover Dark Matter in the post-WIMP Era

2026-07-22

Uncovering the particle nature of dark matter (DM) is one of the primary goals of fundamental physics and cosmology today. DM accounts for 85% of the matter in the Universe, but only its gravitational effects on the motion of celestial objects have been observed. DM research is arguably in a critical state: the long-prevailing WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) paradigm has not been confirmed experimentally up to now, putting the focus on the electroweak scale under serious pressure. I played a leading role in both identifying and bringing to fall some of the most promising WIMP signal candidates, thanks to new data analysis and modeling techniques that I continuously develop and employ with my group. Furthermore, I am an initiator and lead developer of a powerful new analysis framework for combining a vast range of astrophysical, cosmological, collider and laboratory data, which now forms the core of the most accurate global studies of DM theories. My goal is to discover particle DM in the post-WIMP era, both by introducing new approaches and by adapting methods that I successfully developed for WIMP searches. I will conclusively probe astrophysical hints for sterile neutrino and axion DM, which are the most promising DM candidates next to the WIMP. However, given the hundreds of valid DM models on the market, one should be wary of repeating the fixation on specific energy scales yet again. I will develop an urgently needed 'principled lampposts' approach to identify gaps in searches for a large number of DM models across the scales. I will cover substantial unexplored territory in the axion and sterile neutrino DM parameter space with upcoming radio and X-ray data, study indirect detection signals over a large range of frequencies, and constrain the substructure of DM with upcoming optical, infrared and radio observations. The results will lead to a detection of the most promising DM candidates, or provide the strongest constraints.

Netherlands

2025-10-15