Related papers: The Case for Dark Radiation
Including nucleon-nucleon correlations due to both Fermi statistics and nuclear forces, we have developed a general formalism for calculating the neutral-current neutrino-nucleon opacities in nuclear matter. We derive corrections to the…
Long-lived sterile neutrinos can play the role of dark matter. We consider the possibility that such neutrinos form a thermal bath with a singlet scalar, while not being in thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model fields. Eventually, the…
The AMS experiment onboard the International Space Station has recently provided cosmic ray electron and positron data with unprecedented precision in the range from 0.5 to 350 GeV. The observed rise in the positron fraction at energies…
Caustics are a generic feature of the nonlinear growth of structure in the dark matter distribution. If the dark matter were absolutely cold, its mass density would diverge at caustics, and the integrated annihilation probability would also…
The presence of light sterile neutrinos is one of the unanswered questions of particle physics. The cosmological counterpart is represented by dark radiation, i.e.\ any form of radiation present in the early Universe besides photons and…
We propose a {\em boomerang mechanism} for the explanation of the excess radio background detected by ARCADE. In an early stage, at a temperature $T \sim 100\,{\rm keV}$, a fraction of relic neutrinos is resonantly converted into dark…
Cosmology at present provides the nominally strongest constraint on the masses of standard model neutrinos. However, this constraint extremely dependent on the nature of the dark energy component of the Universe. When the dark energy…
String theory naturally leads to the expectation that dark energy is not stable, and may be evolving as captured by the Swampland de Sitter conjectures. Moreover, motivated by the distance conjecture, a unification of dark sector has been…
Cosmology in the near future promises a measurement of the sum of neutrino masses, a fundamental Standard Model parameter, as well as substantially-improved constraints on the dark energy. We use the shape of the BOSS redshift-space galaxy…
We explore an extended cosmological scenario where the dark matter is an admixture of cold and additional non-cold species. The mass and temperature of the non-cold dark matter particles are extracted from a number of cosmological…
We update the constraints on the cosmological parameters by adopting the Planck data released in 2015 and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) measurements including the new DR14 quasar sample measurement at redshift $z=1.52$, and we conclude…
The Peccei-Quinn mechanism presents a neat solution to the strong CP problem. As a by-product, it provides an ideal dark matter candidate, "the axion", albeit with a tiny mass. Axions therefore can act as dark radiation if excited with…
The luminosity densities of high-energy cosmic radiations are studied to find connections among the various components, including high-energy neutrinos measured with IceCube and gamma rays with the Fermi satellite. Matching the cosmic-ray…
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…
Standard cosmology predicts that prior to matter-radiation equality about 41% of the energy density was in free-streaming neutrinos. In many beyond Standard Model scenarios, however, the amount and free-streaming nature of this component is…
Neutrinos are amongst the most abundant particles in the universe. The fact that they are massive particles proves that the Standard Model is an incomplete theory and needs to be extended. This thesis focuses on the study of neutrino…
It has been suggested that Einstein's theory of General Relativity can be modified to accomodate mismatches between the gravitational field and luminous matter on a wide range of scales. Covariant theories of modified gravity generically…
From measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the effective number of neutrino is found to be close to the standard model value Neff = 3.046 for the \LambdaCDM cosmology. One can obtain the same CMB angular power spectrum as…
Recent results from the AMS-02 data have confirmed that the cosmic ray positron fraction increases with energy between 10 and 200GeV. This quantity should not exceed 50%, and it is hence expected that it will either converge towards 50% or…
We further investigate slowing down of acceleration of the universe scenario for five parametrizations of the equation of state of dark energy using four sets of supernovae data. In a maximal probability analysis we also use the baryon…