Related papers: Dark Radiation candidates after Planck
New measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by the Planck mission have greatly increased our knowledge about the Universe. Dark radiation, a weakly interacting component of radiation, is one of the important ingredients in our…
We present new constraints on the relativistic neutrino effective number N_eff and on the Cosmic Microwave Background power spectrum lensing amplitude A_L from the recent Planck 2013 data release. Including observations of the CMB large…
New light species can contribute to the number of effective relativistic degrees of freedom ($N_{\rm eff}$) at Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) which is precisely measured by Planck. In this work, we consider an MeV scale thermally…
We consider the effects of new light species on the Cosmic Microwave Background. In the massless limit, these effects can be parameterized in terms of a single number, the relativistic degrees of freedom. We perform a thorough survey of…
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…
We explore the possibility of redshift-dependent deviations in the contribution of relativistic degrees of freedom to the radiation budget of the cosmos, conventionally parameterized by the effective number of neutrinos $N_{\rm eff}$, from…
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…
We use Bayesian model comparison to determine whether extensions to Standard-Model neutrino physics -- primarily additional effective numbers of neutrinos and/or massive neutrinos -- are merited by the latest cosmological data. Given the…
The most recent measurements of the temperature and low-multipole polarization anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from the Planck satellite, when combined with galaxy clustering data from the Baryon Oscillation…
We evaluate the ability of future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments to measure the power spectrum of large scale structure using quadratic estimators of the weak lensing deflection field. We calculate the sensitivity of upcoming…
We investigate the observational constraints on the cosmic neutrino background (CNB) given by the extended $\Lambda$CDM scenario ($\Lambda$CDM $+ N_{\rm eff} + \sum m_{\nu} + c^2_{\rm eff} + c^2_{\rm vis} + \xi_{\nu}$) using the latest…
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…
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…
The detection of the B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by the BICEP2 experiment implies that the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ should be involved in the base standard cosmology. In this paper, we extend the…
We present a joint analysis of the Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) and Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) final data releases. A key novelty of our study is the use of a new full-shape (FS) likelihood for the…
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…
Since the B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) was detected by the BICEP2 experiment and an unexpectedly large tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r=0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$, was found, the base standard cosmology should at least…
The Planck experiment will soon provide a very accurate measurement of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies. This will let cosmologists determine most of the cosmological parameters with unprecedented accuracy. Future experiments will…
In this paper we set bounds on the radiation content of the Universe and neutrino properties by using the WMAP-5 year CMB measurements complemented with most of the existing CMB and LSS data (WMAP5+All),imposing also self-consistent BBN…
Cosmic microwave background measurements have pushed to higher resolution, lower noise, and more sky coverage. These data enable a unique test of the early universe's expansion rate and constituents such as effective number of relativistic…