English

Dark Radiation after Planck

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2013-08-09 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We present new constraints on the relativistic neutrino effective number N_eff and on the Cosmic Microwave Background power spectrum lensing amplitude A_L from the recent Planck 2013 data release. Including observations of the CMB large angular scale polarization from the WMAP satellite, we obtain the bounds N_eff = 3.71 +/- 0.40 and A_L = 1.25 +/- 0.13 at 68% c.l.. The Planck dataset alone is therefore suggesting the presence of a dark radiation component at 91.1% c.l. and hinting for a higher power spectrum lensing amplitude at 94.3% c.l.. We discuss the agreement of these results with the previous constraints obtained from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). Considering the constraints on the cosmological parameters, we found a very good agreement with the previous WMAP+SPT analysis but a tension with the WMAP+ACT results, with the only exception of the lensing amplitude.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1304.6217,
  title  = {Dark Radiation after Planck},
  author = {Najla Said and Eleonora Di Valentino and Martina Gerbino},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1304.6217},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

5 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:04:42.067Z