English

Dark Radiation and Inflationary Freedom

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2017-01-25 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

A relaxed primordial power spectrum (PPS) of scalar perturbations arising from inflation can impact the dark radiation constraints obtained from Cosmic Microwave Background and other cosmological measurements. If inflation produces a non-standard PPS for the initial fluctuations, a fully thermalized light sterile neutrino can be favoured by CMB observations, instead of being strongly disfavoured. In the case of a thermal axion, the constraints on the axion mass are relaxed when the PPS is different from the standard power law.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1510.05980,
  title  = {Dark Radiation and Inflationary Freedom},
  author = {Stefano Gariazzo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.05980},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures; to appear in the Proceedings of the TAUP 2015 conference