A Fundamental Test of the Nature of Dark Matter

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Abstract
Dark matter may consist of weakly interacting elementary particles or of macroscopic compact objects. We show that the statistics of the gravitational lensing of high-redshift supernovae strongly discriminate between these two classes of dark matter candidates. We develop a method of calculating the magnification distribution of supernovae, which can be interpreted in terms of the properties of the lensing objects. With simulated data, we show that 50 well-measured Type Ia supernovae (Δm ~ 0.2 mag) at redshifts ~1 can clearly distinguish macroscopic from microscopic dark matter if Ω0 0.2 and all dark matter is in one form or the other.