What is the Dark Matter: the importance of Baryons

Abstract

The standard model for cosmology states that only 5% of the mass-energy density of the Universe is in ordinary matter. Other than its gravitational properties, the nature of the dark matter is unknown, leading to significant effort on constraining its properties. I will discuss how effects in the ordinary matter influence the constraints that can be put on the theories of dark matter, and will specifically examine constraints on direct detection of axionic dark matter, and substructure constraints on self-interacting dark matter.