Sources and distributions of dark matter

Abstract

In the first section, I will try to convey a sense of the variety of observational inputs that tell us about the existence and the spatial distribution of dark matter in the universe. In the second section, I will briefly review the four main dark matter candidates, taking note of each candidate's status in the world of particle physics, its production in the early universe, its effect upon large scale structure formation and the means by which it may be detected. Section 3 concerns the energy spectrum of (cold) dark matter particles on earth as may be observed some day in a direct detection experiment. It is a brief account of work done in collaboration with J. Ipser and, more recently, with I. Tkachev and Y. Wang.