The evidence for dark matter and the requirements for a dark matter particle

The evidence for dark matter will be summarized, from the long and complicated history [1] -- with many actors in addition to the central figures of Fritz Zwicky and Vera Rubin -- to the recent observations of structure formation, gravitational lensing, and systems like the bullet cluster. There are a vast number of dark matter candidates, with masses ranging over at least 10 orders of magnitude (and in some analyses more than 40 orders of magnitude). But there is also a "WIMP miracle" that leads to about the right abundance of dark matter (as observed in astronomy) if the particle interacts through only the weak interaction (plus gravity) and has a mass ~ 100 GeV/c². There appears to be only one candidate which has a precisely defined mass and couplings, and is consistent with experiment and observation, and that is the 70 GeV/c² WIMP that we propose here.

[1] Yann Mambrini, Particles in the Dark Universe (Springer, 2021).