Microlensing Search for Dark Matter at all Mass Scales

Abstract

Gravitational microlensing is a powerful tool to detect compact matter on mass scales ranging from roughly $10^{-6} M_\odot$ to $10^6 M_\odot$ . Of particular importance is the fact that lensing is sensitive to both luminous and dark matter. There are two practically important regimes of microlensing: cosmological and Galactic. The former deals with the effect of stellar mass objects at cosmological distances on even more distant quasars, the latter treats stellar mass objects in the Milky Way or its Halo on stars in the Magellanic Clouds, the Galactic Bulge or M31. Microlensing has been detected in about ten quasars, roughly a dozen microlensing events towards stars in the Magellanic Clouds are on record, more than 1000 events have been measured towards stars in the Bulge. The large majority of microlensing events towards quasars and towards stars in the Magellanic Clouds or the Bulge can be explained by ordinary stellar mass objects. A small fraction of the Galactic microlensing events ($< 5 - 10$ %) could potentially be due to dark matter objects, including stellar mass Black Holes. Current and planned experiments will clarify the question whether any dark matter objects are necessary at all to explain microlensing events.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html