Related papers: Primordial Nucleosynthesis: A Cosmological Probe
The nonbaryonic dark matter of the Universe is assumed to consist of new stable forms of matter. Their stability reflects symmetry of micro world and mechanisms of its symmetry breaking. Particle candidates for cosmological dark matter are…
Astronomical observations from small galaxies to the largest scales in the universe can be consistently explained by the simple idea of dark matter. The nature of dark matter is however still unknown. Empirically it cannot be any of the…
High-energy cosmic neutrinos can reveal new fundamental particles and interactions, probing energy and distance scales far exceeding those accessible in the laboratory. This white paper describes the outstanding particle physics questions…
This article summarizes the possible roles of neutrinos in cosmology, from the first three minutes onward. The fact that primordial neutrinos are about as numerous as the photons of the cosmological background radiation means that neutrino…
Experiments with cold and ultracold neutrons have reached a level of precision such that problems far beyond the scale of the present Standard Model of particle physics become accessible to experimental investigation. Due to the close links…
I discuss some central issues in particle physics which are potentially relevant to cosmology. I first briefly review the present (glorious) experimental status of the Standard Model, emphasizing that it provides a firm foundation both for…
The standard theory of cosmic structure formation posits that the present-day rich structure of the Universe developed through gravitational amplification of tiny matter density fluctuations generated in its very early history. Recent…
Using the cosmological constants derived from WMAP, the standard big bang nucleosynthesis (SBBN) predicts the light elements primordial abundances for 4He, 3He, D, 6Li and 7Li. These predictions are in satisfactory agreement with the…
Abundance observations indicate the presence of often surprisingly large amounts of neutron capture (i.e., s- and r-process) elements in old Galactic halo and globular cluster stars. These observations provide insight into the nature of the…
We constrain proposed phenomenological models for a vacuum energy which decays with the expansion of the universe from considerations of standard big bang nucleosynthesis. Several such models which attempt to solve the cosmological age…
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…
All cosmological observations to date are consistent with adiabatic, Gaussian and nearly scale invariant initial conditions. These findings provide strong evidence for a particular symmetry breaking pattern in the very early universe (with…
The existence of big bang relic neutrinos - exact analogues of the big bang relic photons comprising the cosmic microwave background radiation - is a basic prediction of standard cosmology. At present, the observational evidence for their…
Understanding the formation of the first stars is one of the frontier topics in modern astrophysics and cosmology. Their emergence signaled the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, leading to a…
Big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have a long history together in the standard cosmology. The general concordance between the predicted and observed light element abundances provides a direct probe of…
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.…
We discuss several proposals for astrophysical and cosmological tests of quantum theory. The tests are motivated by deterministic hidden-variables theories, and in particular by the view that quantum physics is merely an effective theory of…
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 preponderance of matter over antimatter in the early Universe, the dynamics of the supernova bursts that produced the heavy elements necessary for life and whether protons eventually decay --- these mysteries at the forefront of…
Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is the earliest sensitive probe of the values of many fundamental particle physics parameters. We have found the leading linear dependences of primordial abundances on all relevant parameters of the standard…