Dark matter plays a central role in the now established standard cosmological model. In these lectures we will review the standard cosmological model with an emphasis on the role played by dark matter. We will discuss the observational evidence for dark matter in detail including the evidence for dark matter arising from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies, the power spectrum of matter fluctuations, hierical clustering, galaxies and clusters, and gravitational lensing. As necessary, we will develop the theory of cosmological perturbations and other necessary prerequesites as far as required to discuss these topics. We will discuss the cosmology of neutrinos and why neutrino dark matter, the only species of dark matter that has been identified to date, can not account for all of the dark matter. We will discuss proposed physical theories of dark matter including axions and weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). In the case of WIMPs we will discuss how these particles may arise in the context of supersymmetric or extra-dimensional physics.
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of British Columbia, Vancouver