Understanding the fundamental nature of dark matter is one of the major challenges facing the physics community today. There are dedicated experimental efforts to search for dark matter interactions with the Standard Model of particle physics, but no concrete evidence of such interactions has been observed. In this talk, I will demonstrate how cosmological and astrophysical observations offer exciting, new possibilities for understanding dark matter beyond its gravitational impact. I will describe the effects of dark matter scattering and annihilation processes in the early Universe and show how observational data constrain broad classes of dark matter models.

Title: New Opportunities for Dark Matter Searches in Cosmology

Kimberly Boddy- The University of Texas at Austin