Speaker
Description
While direct and indirect detection experiments have yet to find dark matter interacting with standard model particles, cosmological probes provide a complementary approach for exploring the physics of dark matter. Phenomenological dark matter-baryon scattering models can probe several particle physics scenarios with cosmological data. These models have two parameters vulnerable to prior volume effects, namely the scattering cross section and the fraction of dark matter that interacts with standard model particles. As either parameter approaches its standard model value, the prior volume becomes unconstrained, resulting in a posterior distribution that is biased towards this region. I will present preliminary results of a frequentist approach using profile likelihoods to constrain dark matter-baryon scattering using observations of the cosmic microwave background.
