Related papers: Primordial Nucleosynthesis After WMAP
A widely accepted viewpoint is to consider candidates for cosmological dark matter as neutral and weakly interacting particles, as well as to consider only light elements in the pregalactic chemical composition. It is shown that stable…
Standard simple assumptions are usually made about the pre-Big Bang Nucleosynthesis epoch, from which we do not have observations. Modifying these assumptions, the predicted density of relic particles such as neutralinos and sterile…
Within the precise cosmological framework provided by the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model and standard Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the chemical evolution of the pregalactic gas can now be followed with accuracy limited only by the uncertainties…
Our universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago from an extremely hot and dense singular point, in a process known as the Big Bang. The hot and dense matter which dominated the system within a few microseconds of its birth was in the…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectrum provides tight constraints on the thermal history of the universe up to $z \sim 2\times 10^6$. At higher redshifts thermalization processes become very efficient so that even large energy…
The Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) model is a cornerstone for the understanding of the evolution of the early universe, making seminal predictions that are in outstanding agreement with the present observation of light element abundances in…
Magnetic fields appear everywhere in the universe. From stars and galaxies, all the way to galaxy clusters and remote protogalactic clouds magnetic fields of considerable strength and size have been repeatedly observed. Despite their…
We present results of cosmological N-body hydrodynamic chemistry simulations of primordial structure growth and evolution in a scenario with warm dark matter (WDM) having a mass of 3 keV (thermal relic) and compare with a model consisting…
The presently accepted "Theory of the Universe" was pioneered 60 years ago by Gamow, Alpher and Herman. As a consequence of the, later dubbed, Hot Big-Bang, matter was neutrons, and after some decay protons, and a history of successive…
The origin of dark matter as a thermal relic offers a compelling way in which the early universe was initially populated by dark matter. Alternative explanations typically appear exotic compared to the simplicity of thermal production.…
Primordial or Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is one of the three historical strong evidences for the Big-Bang model together with the expansion of the Universe and the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB). The recent results by the…
An introductory review of the early evolution of the Universe relevant to the primordial synthesis of the light nuclides deuterium, helium-3, helium-4 and lithium-7. The predictions of the element abundances in the "standard", hot, big bang…
The spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background follows Planck's black body radiation formula and shows a remarkable constant temperature of T = 2.7. About 380 000 years after the Big Bang at a temperature of T = 3000 Kelvin in the matter…
Light, weakly-coupled dark sectors may be naturally decoupled in the early universe and enter equilibrium with the Standard Model bath during the epoch of primordial nucleosynthesis. The equilibration and eventual decoupling of dark sector…
Using the semi-analytic method proposed by \citet{Esma91} we calculate the abundances of the light elements produced during primordial nucleosynthesis assuming that the gauge coupling constants of the fundamental interactions may vary. We…
We study the effects of dark-matter annihilation during the epoch of big-bang nucleosynthesis on the primordial abundances of light elements. We improve the calculation of the light-element abundances by taking into account the effects of…
The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical…
Among the few ways to probe the early Universe, neutrinos offer a particular window on high energy phenomena occurring before recombination. We discuss the opportunities of observing primordial high energy neutrinos (Phenus): neutrinos…
The first stars fundamentally transformed the early universe by emitting the first light and by producing the first heavy elements. These effects were predetermined by the mass distribution of the first stars, which is thought to have been…
It is usually assumed that relic neutrinos possess a Fermi-Dirac distribution, acquired during thermal equilibrium in the Early Universe. However, various mechanisms could introduce strong distortions in this distribution. We perform a…