Physics Seminar by Cem Eröncel

Evidences for the existence of dark matter is plentiful, such as galaxy rotation curves, galaxy clusters, and the cosmic microwave background. All these observations depend solely on gravitational interactions. Therefore, astrophysical and cosmological probes that rely entirely on gravitational interactions will play a vital role in understanding the nature of dark matter. Being the dominant matter component in the universe, dark matter directly affects the structure formation process. For this reason, by analyzing the structure formation both theoretically and observationally, we can obtain valuable clues on the nature of dark matter. In this talk, after giving a brief introduction to dark matter and its effect on structure formation, I will discuss what we learned about the nature of dark matter from the structure formation observations. Then, I will present my recent works on Axion-like-particles which are highly popular and motivated dark matter candidates.