Dark Matter Insights from Small-scale Structure

by Ethan Nadler

Thursday 25 Jun 2026, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/Zurich

4/2-037 - TH meeting room (CERN)

Small-scale cosmic structure is an essential probe of fundamental dark matter physics. Facilities including JWST, Rubin, Roman, and Euclid are rapidly advancing observations of dwarf galaxies, stellar streams, and strong lenses, opening a path toward "high-precision cosmology" on small scales. I will describe a research program that uses these data to probe dark matter's particle mass, production mechanism, and non-gravitational interactions. I will highlight results from new simulations beyond cold dark matter, including self-interacting dark matter simulations that address anomalies in current small-scale structure data. Finally, I will show that combining dwarf galaxy and strong-lensing data may reveal completely dark halos for the first time, providing a critical test of the cold dark matter paradigm.