The Interaction of Dark Matter with Ordinary Matter

Dear Colleagues,

Dark matter is known to gravitationally interact with ordinary matter, dominating over all astrophysical and cosmological scales in terms of its gravitational pull on ordinary matter. Nevertheless, interactions between dark and ordinary matter other than gravitational interactions have never been observed. Constituting about 85% of the total mass content of the universe, understanding the nature of dark matter is certainly one of the most important tasks faced by our scientific community in this century. Due to the lack of experimental evidence for what has been considered the most natural dark matter candidate, the so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), various new models have been formed over the past few decades. New interactions between dark matter and ordinary matter are often among the main ingredients in these new models, which are now referred to as dark sector models. The dark photon, the dark Higgs boson, axion-like particles, or a dark Z’ boson are just some examples of the possible mediators of these hypothetical new interactions between dark matter and ordinary matter. This Special Issue aims to collect new material based on recent developments from both theory and experiments that will describe the status of our knowledge regarding possible interactions of dark matter with ordinary matter. This new material will allow experimentalists to identify new searches and possibly new methods and theorists to consider all experimental constraints when building their models.

Dr. Gianluca Inguglia
Dr. Enrico Graziani
Guest Editors

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• dark force
• milli-charged particles
• long-lived particles
• dark Higgs/photon/z’
• simps
• dark sector