Related papers: A New Target for Cosmic Axion Searches
One of the primary targets of current and future cosmological observations are light thermal relics of the hot big bang. Within the Standard Model of particle physics, an important thermal relic are cosmic neutrinos, while interesting…
Cosmological observations allow to measure the abundance of light relics produced in the early Universe. Most studies focus on the thermal freeze-out scenario, yet light relics produced by freeze-in are generic for models in which new light…
Light dark matter is a compelling experimental target in light of stringent constraints on heavier WIMPs. However, for a sub-MeV WIMP, the universe is sufficiently well understood at temperatures below 10 MeV that there is no room for it to…
Light thermal relics of the hot big bang, often quantified by the parameter $N_\mathrm{eff}$, are one of the primary targets of cosmological measurements. At present, the energy density in such relics is constrained to be less than ten…
Standard Model extensions often predict low-mass and very weakly interacting particles, such as the axion. A number of small-scale experiments at the intensity/precision frontier are actively searching for these elusive particles,…
Many well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of new light species that may have been produced in the early universe. Prominent examples include axions, sterile neutrinos, gravitinos, dark photons, and more. 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 study the potential of a future, large-volume photometric survey to constrain the axion mass $m_a$ in the hot dark matter limit. Future surveys such as Euclid will have significantly more constraining power than current observations for…
Axions and other very light axion-like particles appear in many extensions of the Standard Model, and are leading candidates to compose part or all of the missing matter of the Universe. They also appear in models of inflation, dark…
Axions and other light particles appear ubiquitously in physics beyond the Standard Model, with a variety of possible couplings to ordinary matter. Cosmology offers a unique probe of these particles as they can thermalize in the hot…
Observers have demonstrated that it is now feasible to measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature at high redshifts. We explore the possible constraints on cosmology which might ultimately be derived from such measurements.…
A number of proposed and ongoing experiments search for axion dark matter with a mass nearing the limit set by small scale structure (${\cal O} ( 10 ^{ - 21 } {\rm eV} ) $). We consider the late universe cosmology of these models, showing…
Many scenarios of physics beyond the standard model predict new light, weakly coupled degrees of freedom, populated in the early universe and remaining as cosmic relics today. Due to their high abundances, these relics can significantly…
One of the targets of future Cosmic Microwave Background and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation measurements is to improve the current accuracy in the neutrino sector and reach a much better sensitivity on extra dark radiation in the Early…
We explore the prospects of upcoming 21-cm surveys of cosmic dawn ($12\lesssim \!z\lesssim\!30$) to provide cosmological information on top of upcoming cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure surveys, such as CMB-S4,…
Dark matter is poorly constrained by direct detection experiments at masses below 1 MeV. This is an important target for the next generation of experiments, and several methods have been proposed to probe this mass range. One class of such…
We study axion strings of hyperlight axions coupled to photons. Hyperlight axions -- axions lighter than Hubble at recombination -- are a generic prediction of the string axiverse. These axions strings produce a distinct quantized…
The increasing precision of cosmological datasets is opening up new opportunities to test predictions from cosmic inflation. Here we study the impact of high precision constraints on the primordial power spectrum and show how a new…
Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies provide strong evidence for the existence of dark matter and dark energy. They can also test its composition, probing the energy density and particle mass of different…
Cosmological data provide a powerful tool in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). An interesting target are light relics, new degrees of freedom which decoupled from the SM while relativistic. Nearly massless relics…