Review on Dark Matter Tools

Abstract

Whilst the need for dark matter was established almost a century ago, only its gravitational interaction has been confirmed so far, allowing for plethora of models for dark matter. The Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) category has received by far the biggest attention, however despite the enormous experimental efforts, these particles remain elusive. The attention of the community has hence moved on to investigate the dark matter landscape over a much larger number of models with varying degrees of resemblances and differences in their predictions. This calls for the need to organise the various facets of dark matter models and their signatures, in order to maximise the experimental sensitivity and to select the models which are compatible with existing data. In this paper, I provide a short review of the most widespread public codes capable of computing dark matter observables. In particular, I discuss what is the status of each numerical tool in terms of: (i) capturing the WIMP phenomenology and (ii) accounting for new trend dark sector models that might be weakly coupled to ordinary matter and/or be strongly self-interacting. This short review has the aim of guiding the user towards selecting the best suited public code to confront his/her model with the largest variety of theoretical predictions and experimental data in order to determine the parameter space consistent with observations for his/her favourite dark matter model.