Related papers: The Case for Dark Radiation
The high-quality cosmological data, which became available in the last decade, have thrusted upon us a rather preposterous composition for the universe which poses one of the greatest challenges theoretical physics has ever faced: the…
We present up to date cosmological bounds on the sum of active neutrino masses as well as on extended cosmological scenarios with additional thermal relics, as thermal axions or sterile neutrino species. Our analyses consider all the…
Short baseline neutrino experiments such as LSND and MiniBooNE seem to suggest the existence of light sterile neutrinos. Meanwhile, current cosmic microwave background (CMB) and big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) measurements place an upper…
A six parameter cosmological model, involving a vacuum energy density that is extremely tiny compared to fundamental particle physics scales, describes a large body of increasingly accurate astronomical data. In a first part of this brief…
Despite an intense theoretical and experimental effort over the past decade, observations of the extragalactic radio background at multiple frequencies below 10 GHz are not understood in terms of known radio sources, and may represent a…
Observations by ARCADE-2 and other telescopes sensitive to low frequency radiation have revealed the presence of an isotropic radio background with a hard spectral index. The intensity of this observed background is found to exceed the flux…
Dark matter particles gravitationally bound to our galaxy should exhibit a characteristic speed distribution limited by their escape velocity at the position of the Earth ($v_{esc}\simeq$ 550 km/s). An ongoing search for anomalous cosmic…
The data collected by ATIC, PPB-BETS, FERMI-LAT and HESS all indicate that there is an electron/positron excess in the cosmic ray energy spectrum above $\sim$ 100 GeV, although different instrumental teams do not agree on the detailed…
Current cosmological observations show a strong signature of the existence of a dark energy component with negative pressure. The most obvious candidate for this dark energy is the cosmological constant (with the equation of state…
Massive neutrinos were the first proposed, and remain the most natural, particle candidate for the dark matter. In the absence of firm laboratory evidence for neutrino mass, considerations of the formation of large scale structure in the…
As cosmology has entered a phase of precision experiments, the content of the universe has been established to contain interesting and not yet fully understood components, namely dark energy and dark matter. While the cause and exact nature…
Recently, a new non-Standard Model neutrino interaction mediated by a light scalar field was proposed, which renders the big-bang relic neutrinos of the cosmic neutrino background a natural dark energy candidate, the so-called Neutrino Dark…
Determining the properties of the dark components of the universe remains one of the outstanding challenges in cosmology. We explore how upcoming CMB anisotropy measurements, galaxy power spectrum data, and supernova (SN) distance…
We study how present data probe standard and non-standard properties of neutrinos and the possible existence of new light particles, freely-streaming or interacting, among themselves or with neutrinos. Our results include: sum m_nu < 0.40…
We derive an anthropic bound on the extra neutrino species, $\Delta N_{\rm eff}$, based on the observation that a positive $\Delta N_{\rm eff}$ suppresses the growth of matter fluctuations due to the prolonged radiation dominated era, which…
We analyze the ability of galaxy and CMB lensing surveys to constrain massive neutrinos and new models of dark radiation. We present a Fisher forecast analysis for neutrino mass constraints with the LSST galaxy survey and the CMB S4 survey.…
Our tightest upper limit on the sum of neutrino mass eigenvalues $M_\nu$ comes from cosmological observations that will improve substantially in the near future, enabling a detection. The combination of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation…
After inflation the Universe presumably undergoes a phase of reheating which in effect starts the thermal big bang cosmology. However, so far we have very little direct experimental or observational evidence of this important phase of the…
Measurements suggest that our universe has a substantial dark energy component. The most recent data on type Ia supernovae give a dark energy density which is in good agreement with other measurements if the dark energy is assumed to be a…
Dark radiation is a compelling extension to $\Lambda$CDM: current experimental results hint at $\Delta N_{\rm eff} \gtrsim 0.5$, which is increased to $\Delta N_{\rm eff} \simeq 1$ if the recent BICEP2 results are included. In recent years…