Particle Dark Matter Under Empirical Cosmological Constraints

Despite overwhelming astrophysical evidence for dark matter, decades of experimental searches for particle candidates have yielded persistent null results. Most contemporary approaches implicitly assume that dark matter must consist of one or more particle species, an assumption rarely examined at the ontological level. In this work, we present a constraint-driven global analysis designed to determine whether a particle ontology for dark matter is required at all by empirical cosmological observations. By enforcing observational constraints from galactic rotation curves, gravitational lensing, large-scale structure formation, and the cosmic microwave background—while explicitly forbidding predefined dark matter candidates, extensions of known particle physics, modified gravity, and anthropic selection—we test whether stable cosmological behavior can be sustained under assumption-minimal conditions. We find that discreteness in the dark sector is structurally required; however, a particle ontology fails. Discrete dark components do not admit stable localization, conserved identity, or object-based persistence across cosmological scales. Instead, stability arises through discrete, gravitationally coupled, non-particle excitations. We identify this ontological class as Non-Particle Dark Matter (NPDM) and designate χ as its fundamental excitation mode. These results constitute a general no-go theorem for particle dark matter under empirical constraints and provide a natural explanation for the long-standing absence of direct detection signals. The findings motivate a fundamental re-framing of the dark matter problem, shifting emphasis from the search for new particles to the investigation of admissible gravitational excitation structures.