Related papers: Universes without the Weak Force: Astrophysical Pr…
Neutron stars offer powerful astrophysical laboratories to probe the properties of dark matter. Gradual accumulation of heavy, non-annihilating dark matter in neutron stars can lead to the formation of comparable-mass black holes, and…
Using an approximate solution to the $N$-body problem in general relativity, and the \emph{principle of local isotropy at any point}, we construct a cosmological model, with zero curvature, for a universe composed uniquely by collision-less…
Of the light nuclides observed in the universe today, D, 3He, 4He, and 7Li are relics from its early evolution. The primordial abundances of these relics, produced via Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) during the first half hour of the…
A star burns its nuclear fuel and balances gravitation by the pressure of the heated gas, during its active lifetime. After the exhaustion of the nuclear fuel, a low mass star finds peace as a {\em white dwarf}, where the pressure support…
The force that governs the evolution of stars is gravity. Indeed this force drives star formation, imposes thermal and density gradients into stars at hydrostatic equilibrium and finally plays the key role in the last phases of their…
Ultralight scalar dark matter can interact with all massive Standard Model particles through a universal coupling. Such a coupling modifies the Standard Model particle masses and affects the dynamics of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We model…
Gravity compresses the matter in the cores of neutron stars to densities which are significantly higher than the density of ordinary atomic nuclei, thus providing a high-pressure environment in which numerous particle processes - from the…
We derive constraints on the injection of free-streaming dark radiation after big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) by considering the decay of a massive hidden sector particle into dark radiation. Such a scenario has the potential to alleviate…
The hypothesis that dark matter consists of superheavy particles with the mass close to the Grand Unification scale is investigated. These particles were created from vacuum by the gravitation of the expanding Universe and their decay led…
Late-decaying particles naturally arise in many extensions of the Standard Model, directly impacting key cosmological processes in the early universe, such as Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). BBN studies often consider electromagnetic energy…
Understanding where elements were formed has been a key goal in astrophysics for nearly a century, with answers involving cosmology, stellar burning, and cosmic explosions. Since 1957, the origin of the heaviest elements (formed via the…
In this work we investigate the impact of two phenomenological Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) scenarios concerning the role of neutrinos in the early universe: non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) and non-unitary three-neutrino mixing.…
We study the dynamics of the quark-hadron transition for a scenario in which the Universe is matter dominated and a large amount of entropy is generated by decaying particles of mass 1--10 TeV, as suggested by a large class of…
Our universe has multiple examples of unexplained gravitational losses in black holes and neutron stars. The smallest black holes of about 4 solar masses means the maximum baryon density \rho \approx 10^{17} grams/cm^3. Any collapse of the…
We show that a self-consistent and coupled treatment of the weak decoupling, big bang nucleosynthesis, and photon decoupling epochs can be used to provide new insights and constraints on neutrino sector physics from high-precision…
We calculate the weak interaction rates of selected light nuclei during the epoch of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), and we assess the impact of these rates on nuclear abundance flow histories and on final light element abundance yields. We…
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) provide complementary probes of the early evolution of the Universe and of its particle content. Neutrinos play important roles in both cases, influencing the…
The heavy elements formed by neutron capture processes have an interesting history from which we can extract useful clues to and constraints upon both the characteristics of the processes themselves and the star formation and…
We study the effect of neutrino degeneracy on primordial nucleosynthesis in a universe in which the cosmological scale factor evolves linearly with time. The degeneracy parameter of electron type neutrinos ($\xi_e$) determines the $n/p$…
Motivated by landscape models in string theory, cosmic nuclear evolution is analyzed allowing the Standard Model Higgs expectation value w to take values different from that in our world (w=1), while holding the Yukawa couplings fixed.…