Weakly Interacting Massive Particles are often said to be the best Dark Matter candidates. Studies have shown that large Dark Matter-photon or Dark Matter-baryon interactions could be allowed by cosmology. Here we address the question of the role of the Dark Matter interactions in more detail to determine at which extent Dark Matter has to be necessarily weakly interacting. To this purpose, we ...

Directional dark matter detection attempts to measure the direction of motion of nuclei recoiling after having interacted with dark matter particles in the halo of our Galaxy. Due to Earth’s motion with respect to the Galaxy, the dark matter flux is concentrated around a preferential direction. An anisotropy in the recoil direction rate is expected as an unmistakable signature of dark matter. T...

The simplest renormalizable effective field theories with asymmetric dark matter bound states contain two additional gauge singlet fields one being the dark matter and the other a mediator particle that the dark matter annihilates into. We examine the physics of one such model with a Dirac fermion as the dark matter. For a range of parameters the Yukawa coupling of the dark matter to the mediat...

We discuss the damping of primordial dark matter fluctuations, taking into account explicitly the interactions of dark matter – whatever their intensity – both with itself and with other particle species. Relying on a general classification of dark matter particle candidates, our analysis provides, from structure formation, a new set of constraints on the dark matter particle mass and interacti...