Related papers: Experimental relevance of low reheating temperatur…
The standard Big Bang cosmology predicts the existence of an, as yet undetected, relic neutrino background, similar to the photons observed in the cosmic microwave background. If neutrinos have mass, then such relic neutrinos are a natural…
The thermal relic abundance of species critically depends on the assumed underlying cosmological model. In the case of neutralinos, freeze-out takes place long before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, which provides the strongest constraint on the…
We discuss how a laboratory detection of a sterile neutrino not only would constitute a fundamental discovery of a new particle, but could also provide an indication of the evolution of the Universe before Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), a…
We explore the implications of the existence of heavy neutral fermions (i.e., sterile neutrinos) for the thermal history of the early universe. In particular, we consider sterile neutrinos with rest masses in the 100 MeV to 500 MeV range,…
Many models possess unwanted relics, which should be diluted by entropy production just before the big-bang nucleosynthesis. A field responsible for the entropy production may produce stable weakly interacting massive particles, if…
The expansion history and thermal physical process that happened in the early Universe before big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) remains relatively unconstrained by observations. Low reheating temperature universes with normalcy temperatures of…
A laboratory detection of a sterile neutrino could provide the first indication of the evolution of the Universe before Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), an epoch yet untested. Such "visible" sterile neutrinos are observable in upcoming…
We study the effects of kination and scalar-tensor pre-Big Bang Nucleosynthesis cosmologies on the non-resonant production of sterile neutrinos. We show that if the peak of the production rate of sterile neutrinos occurs during the…
One of the primary targets of current and future cosmological observations are light thermal relics of the hot big bang. Within the Standard Model of particle physics, an important thermal relic are cosmic neutrinos, while interesting…
Recent cosmological data favour additional relativistic degrees of freedom beyond the three active neutrinos and photons, often referred to as 'dark' radiation. Light sterile neutrinos is one of the prime candidates for such additional…
Cosmological measurements of the radiation density in the early universe can be used as a sensitive probe of physics beyond the standard model. Observations of primordial light element abundances have long been used to place non-trivial…
Standard Model neutrinos are not usually considered plausible dark matter candidates because the usual treatment of their decoupling in the early universe implies that their mass must be sufficiently small to make them ``hot'' dark matter.…
We investigate observable cosmological aspects of sterile neutrino dark matter produced via the freeze-in mechanism. The study is performed in a framework that admits many cosmologically interesting variations: high temperature production…
We point out that the relic densities of singlet (sterile) neutrinos of interest in viable warm and cold dark matter scenarios, depend on the characteristics of the QCD transition in the early universe. In the most promising of these dark…
We point out that in scenarios with a low reheating temperature $T_R << 100$ MeV at the end of (the last episode of) inflation or entropy production, the abundance of sterile neutrinos becomes largely independent of their coupling to active…
The connection between cosmological observations and neutrino physics is discussed in detail. Neutrinos decouple from thermal contact in the early Universe at a temperature of order 1 MeV which coincides with the temperature where light…
We present here a scenario, based on a low reheating temperature T_R << 100 MeV at the end of (the last episode of) inflation, in which the coupling of sterile neutrinos to active neutrinos can be as large as experimental bounds permit…
It is commonly assumed that the cosmological and astrophysical bounds on the mixings of sterile with active neutrinos are much more stringent than those obtained from laboratory measurements. We point out that in scenarios with a very low…
We consider the cosmological effects of sterile neutrinos with the masses of $150- 450$ MeV. The decay of sterile neutrinos changes the thermal history of the Universe and affects the energy density of radiation at the recombination and the…
The early universe provides a unique laboratory for probing the frontiers of particle physics in general and neutrino physics in particular. The primordial abundances of the relic nuclei produced during the first few minutes of the…