TAPIR Seminar

Over the past four decades, cosmologists have assumed that dark matter is made of cold (non-relativistic) and non-interacting hypothetical particles with typical mass m~100GeV leading to the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm. Although this hypothesis describes the large-scale distribution of galaxies in the universe, there are long-standing discrepancies at small-scales that suggest we do not have the complete picture, e.g. cusp-core and too-big-to-fail problems. To have the complete picture, we need numerical simulations exploring the synergy between baryonic matter and new dark matter physics beyond CDM. I will discuss the implications of my recent cosmological simulations with self-interacting dark matter and quantum (fuzzy) dark matter on small-scale challenges, addressing how these simulations offer a new path to probe the fundamental nature of dark matter.