My area of research is (related to) large scale structure and substructure of dark matter. Not sure if you're interested more in the question of "what is dark matter" (from more of a particle physics point of view) or "what do we know about how dark matter is distributed and its gravitational interactions" (a more astronomy point of view). This answer leans more toward the second one. I won't even touch dark energy, I'm sure someone else can do better than I.
Sadly I don't know a great textbook on dark matter, or even with a big section on the topic. This is probably because dark matter/energy are not solved problems, so they're discussed more in periodicals than in texts. Yes there are textbooks, I just haven't read one that I've found fantastic.
Here's my pick of some papers on dark matter. Some are classics, some are recent, all are highly cited. Yes, they're all extremely technical. At an introductory level I don't suggest reading them all front to back and trying to understand everything; have a skim, try and understand the main results, read again in more detail if you find it interesting. Ask more specific questions as you come across them.
If you find yourself stuck behind a paywall trying to use any of the links on the pages linked below, use the arXiv link instead.
THE must see observational dark matter paper (and even at only a couple of pages long, it packs a punch). The bullet cluster is considered the "smoking gun" of dark matter existence, and pictures of it have adorned the introductory slides of dark matter talks for years. People still debate alternate explanations of the observation, but mostly the consensus is that this proves DM.
Before the bullet cluster, spiral galaxy rotation curves were some of the strongest evidence for DM. Reading the Wikipedia article is a decent primer for the paper.
Another observation that backs up the DM model is the "Lyman-$\alpha$ forest". The absorption of distant quasar emission by hydrogen clouds at many redshifts gives a "forest" of absorption lines which can be used to map the distribution of matter between us and the quasar. This can be checked against DM models, and seems to give generally good agreement.
The classic paper on the internal structure of dark matter clumps or "haloes" describes the NFW (Navarro-Frenk-White) density profile (equation 3). It turns out this result isn't quite exact and needs some corrections, and there's a long debate about whether the centres of haloes are "cusps" or "cores", but in the grand scheme of things the results of NFW96 are still widely used.
Simulations of DM can also be great fun. My two picks are Millenium and Bolshoi (these have some cousins; Millenium has Millenium-XXL, Millenium-II, MiniMillenium, Aquarius, and Bolshoi has BigBolshoi/Multidark and ViaLactea; essentially same people, same codes, different resolution/volume/focus). People have done many things with the results of these simulations, but the first result is just the organization, evolution and properties of the DM density field. Plus there are some very nice pictures and movies and more pictures and movies of the outputs.
The particle nature of DM is not my area of expertise, but this is the best-known recent-ish review I could find. 8 years old mind you, so there's been lots of activity in this field since. I'll leave it to someone else to point out the best references on the latest results.
Ok I lied, this last paper is not particularly well known. I just happen to work down the hall from one of the authors so I've heard lots about it, and the others are well known/respected so I think it carries some weight. They make some predictions about the $\gamma$-ray signal they would expect for a particular model of self-interacting dark matter (the maps on p. 12 / journal p. 604 are pretty cool). Still an area of ongoing research, I just think it's interesting so I threw it in here.
Hope you found some of those interesting/enjoyable. If you have any questions, just ask (comment or new question as appropriate).
This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-03-24 05:06 (UCT), posted by SE-user Kyle
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