Galaxies and their Dark Matter halos

Dark Matter (DM) is ubiquitous and of fundamental importance 
in Cosmology and
  Astro-Particle Physics. The realization that our own `visible' Milky 
Way (MW) galaxy is
  embedded within a 'dark' halo has been with us for more than half a 
century. In the last
  few decades, the same structure has been found for all galaxies, 
especially, local disk
  galaxies. Yet, knowledge of these dark halos is still poor with 
considerable uncertainty/
  debate on its size, mass or density structure, etc. Knowledge of the 
velocity structures
  of the DM particles is even poorer and has been largely limited to some 
physically motivated
  ansatz or extracted out of DM-only simulations. This lack of knowledge 
impacts our efforts
  to understand the nature of DM, say its mass, cross-sections, whether 
they are self-interacting,
  whether they are fuzzy, etc. The path to this fundamental component of 
DM research, which
  impacts detection experiments, is through our understanding of the 
phase-space of DM which
  for real galaxies can only be extracted from observations (unlike 
simulations).

  About a decade back, we started a program to extract the nature of the 
DM phase space from
  observational data for the Milky Way and other local galaxies, with an 
eye toward detection
  experiments and to confront DM simulations/ansatzes with real data.  In 
this talk, I will
  try to walk you through the progress that has been made in the last ten 
years.