Related papers: Dark Radiation and Decaying Matter
Dark radiation (DR) is ubiquitous in physics beyond the Standard Model (SM), and its interactions with the SM and dark matter (DM) lead to a variety of interesting effects on cosmological observables. However, even in scenarios where DR is…
Nuclear double beta decay, an extremely rare radioactive decay process, is - in one of its variants - one of the most exciting means of research into particle physics beyond the standard model. The large progress in sensitivity of…
Sterile neutrinos with masses in the keV range are well-motivated extensions to the Standard Model that could explain the observed neutrino masses while also making up the dark matter (DM) of the Universe. If sterile neutrinos are DM then…
A huge amount of good quality data converges towards the picture of a spatially flat universe undergoing the today observed phase of accelerated expansion. This new observational trend is commonly addressed as Precision Cosmology. Despite…
There are many indications that ordinary matter represents only a tiny fraction of the matter content of the Universe, with the remainder assumed to consist of some different type of matter, which, for various reasons must be nonluminous…
The combination of detections of anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and observations of the large-scale distribution of galaxies probes the primordial density fluctuations of the universe on spatial scales varying by…
We examine the cosmology of warm dark matter (WDM), both stable and decaying, from the point of view of structure formation. We compare the matter power spectrum associated to WDM masses of 1.5 keV and 0.158 keV, with that expected for the…
We study the growth of density perturbations in a universe with unstable dark matter particles. The mass (m_\nu) range 30 eV < m_\nu < 10 keV with lifetimes ($t_d$) in the range 10^7 sec < t_d < 10^16 sec are considered. We calculate the…
Cosmological measurements of the radiation density in the early universe can be used as a sensitive probe of physics beyond the standard model. Observations of primordial light element abundances have long been used to place non-trivial…
We show how recent data from observations of the cosmic microwave background may suggest the presence of additional radiation density which appeared after big bang nucleosynthesis. We propose a general scheme by which this radiation could…
Popular extensions of the standard model of particle physics feature new fields and symmetries which could, for example, dynamically generate neutrino masses from $B-L$ spontaneous symmetry breaking. If a new light scalar that decays into…
Results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and recently from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) have indicated the possible existence of an extra radiation component in addition to the well…
From observations at low and high redshifts, it is well known that the bulk of dark matter (DM) has to be stable or at least very long-lived. However, the possibility that a small fraction of DM is unstable or that all DM decays with a…
The precision era of multi-messenger astronomy, together with modern astrophysical, cosmological, and gravitational wave observations, increasingly points toward the existence of a ``dark" sector that cannot be explained within the…
We revisit cosmological neutrino mass bounds when a fraction of dark matter is allowed to decay to massless dark radiation. By compensating the late-time increase in the matter density induced by neutrinos becoming non-relativistic,…
Progress in observational cosmology over the past five years has established that the Universe is dominated dynamically by dark matter and dark energy. Both these new and apparently independent forms of matter-energy have properties that…
It is attractive to suppose for several astrophysical reasons that the universe has close to the critical density in light (~30 eV) neutrinos which decay radiatively with a lifetime of ~10^{23} sec. In such a cosmology the universe is…
There is mounting observational evidence that the expansion of our Universe is undergoing a late-time acceleration. Among many proposals to describe this phenomenon, the cosmological constant seems to be the simplest and the most natural…
We study varying forms of viscous dark matter and try to address the intriguing tensions of the standard model of cosmology with recent cosmological data, including the Hubble and $S_8$ tensions. We note that by assuming the dark matter…
We examine the role of the large--scale anisotropy of the high--energy cosmic ray distribution in a search for the heavy decaying dark matter (DM) signal. Using recent anisotropy measurements from the extensive air shower (EAS)…