Related papers: Increasing Neff with particles in thermal equilibr…
We show that the new measurement of the effective number of neutrinos Neff by the Planck satellite can be used to set a robust lower bound on the mass of cold thermal dark matter of O(MeV). Our limit applies if the dark matter remains in…
Tantalizing cosmological and terrestrial evidence suggests the number of light neutrinos may be greater than 3, motivating a careful re-examination of cosmological bounds on extra light species. Big Bang Nucleosynthesis constrains the…
By using most of the present CMB and LSS measurements and the BBN constraints on the primordial helium abundance, Y_p, we set bounds on the radiation content of the Universe and neutrino properties. We consider lepton asymmetric…
The vast majority of extensions of the Standard Model affecting the number of effective relativistic neutrino species ($N_{\rm eff}$) do so additively, namely, they enhance this quantity with some light state contributing to dark radiation.…
We consider relatively heavy neutrinos $\nu_H$, mostly contributing to a sterile state $\nu_s$, with mass in the range 10 MeV $\lesssim m_s \lesssim m_{\pi} \sim 135$ MeV, which are thermally produced in the early universe in collisional…
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…
We consider heavy sterile neutrinos $\nu_s$, with mass in the range 10 MeV $\lesssim m_s \lesssim m_{\pi} \sim 135$ MeV, thermally produced in the early universe and freezing out after the QCD phase transition. The existence of these…
New data from WMAP have appeared, related to both the fractional energy density in relativistic species at decoupling and also the primordial helium abundance, at the same time as other independent observational estimates suggest a higher…
Thermal dark matter that couples more strongly to electrons and photons than to neutrinos will heat the electron-photon plasma relative to the neutrino background if it becomes nonrelativistic after the neutrinos decouple from the thermal…
We present a new constraint on the effective number of relativistic species in the early universe, $N_{\rm eff}$, by combining recent primordial helium abundance measurements from the Large Binocular Telescope $Y_p$ Project with primordial…
Recent indications from both particle physics and cosmology suggest the existence of more than three neutrino species. In cosmological analyses the effects of neutrino mass and number of species can in principle be disentangled for fixed…
The number of effective relativistic neutrino species represents a fundamental probe of the thermal history of the early Universe, and as such of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Traditional approaches to the neutrino decoupling are…
The cosmic energy density in the form of radiation before and during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is typically parameterized in terms of the effective number of neutrinos N_eff. This quantity, in case of no extra degrees of freedom,…
Recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) results from the Planck satellite, combined with previous CMB data and Hubble constant measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope, provide a constraint on the effective number of relativistic…
We compute the thermalization of a hidden sector consisting of minicharged fermions (MCPs) and massless hidden photons in the early Universe. The precise measurement of the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by Planck and…
In the framework of the standard, hot big bang cosmological model the dynamics of the early evolution of the universe is controlled by the energy density of relativistic particles, among which neutrinos play an important role. In…
Short-baseline neutrino anomalies suggest the existence of low-mass ( m \sim O(1)~eV) sterile neutrinos \nu_s. These would be efficiently produced in the early universe by oscillations with active neutrino species, leading to a thermal…
We derive here a robust bound on the effective number of neutrinos from constraints on primordial nucleosynthesis yields of deuterium and helium. In particular, our results are based on very weak assumptions on the astrophysical…
Recent cosmological data analyses hint at the presence of an extra relativistic energy component in the early universe. This component is often parametrized as an excess of the effective neutrino number N_{eff} over the standard value of…
We present calculations showing that upcoming Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments will have the power to improve on current constraints on neutrino masses and provide new limits on neutrino degeneracy parameters. The latter could…