The Cosmic Cocktail

Katherine Freese is director of Nordita, the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Stockholm, and professor of physics at the University of Michigan.

Preface ix 1 The Golden Era of Particle Cosmology, or How I Joined the Chicago Mafia 1 New York City; Fermilab: The Atom Smasher in the Prairie; Chicago: A New Zeitgeist in Cosmology; Dunkle Materie: The Dark Enigma; WIMPs at Harvard 2 How Do Cosmologists Know Dark Matter Exists? The Beginning of the Dark Matter Story 9 What Do Galaxies Look Like?; Observational Evidence for Dark Matter; Formation of Galaxies and Clusters; Dark Matter Dominates 3 The Big Picture of the Universe: Einstein and the Big Bang 35 Geometry of the Universe; Cosmic Microwave Background; Outer Space and the Queen of Sweden; Pie Picture of the Universe 4 Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Proves That Atomic Matter Constitutes Only 5% of the Universe 67 A Story about Big Bang Nucleosynthesis; Particles in the Early Universe: A Primordial Soup; Origins of the Elements; Atoms Make Up Only 5% of the Universe 5 What Is Dark Matter? 83 Rocks or Dust; Matter and Antimatter; Neutrinos; MACHOs; Black Holes; The Particle Zoo; The WIMP Miracle; WIMPs in the Human Body and a Tennis Match 6 The Discovery of the Higgs Boson 108 Atom Smashers: The Large Hadron Collider; CERN; Discovery of the Higgs 7 The Experimental Hunt for Dark Matter Particles 123 The Three Prongs of the Hunt for Dark Matter; Dark Matter at the Atom Smasher at CERN: Missing Energy plus Jets; What Has CERN Done for Society?; Will the LHC Bring Doomsday?; Direct Detection: Abandoned Mines, Alpine Tunnels, and Nightclubs in Jerusalem; Indirect Detection: Annihilations in Space and at the South Pole 8 Claims of Detection: Are They Real? 147 Direct Detection in Underground Laboratories; Indirect Detection of WIMP Annihilation: Positrons, Neutrinos, and Gamma Rays; The Future of Dark Matter Experiments 9 Dark Energy and the Fate of the Universe 183 Rounding Out the Universe: Type IA Supernovae and Dark Energy; The Future of the Universe; Epicycles; Epilogue Afterword: Dark Stars 215 Acknowledgments 219 Notes 221 Suggestions for Further Reading 233 Index 235