Related papers: Dark Sector Equilibration During Nucleosynthesis
We analyze the effect of variation of fundamental couplings and mass scales on primordial nucleosynthesis in a systematic way. The first step establishes the response of primordial element abundances to the variation of a large number of…
The prediction of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature and tensor fluctuations is among the main features of cosmic inflation. The current measurements of the primordial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
The cosmological abundance of nucleons determined from considerations of Big Bang nucleosynthesis allegedly provides compelling evidence for non-nucleonic dark matter. Recent developments in measurements of primordial light element…
We investigate the effect of potentially large distortions of the relic neutrino spectra on cosmological observables. To that end, we consider a phenomenological model of "gray" spectral distributions, described by a single parameter, which…
The recent cosmological picture contains a significant tension indicating that our standard $\Lambda$CDM picture may be incomplete. Early Dark Energy models can alleviate the Hubble tension, by assuming an early acceleration that could…
New measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe have plunged the standard model of cosmology into a severe crisis. In this letter, we propose a simple resolution to the problem that relies on a first order phase transition in a dark…
Light new vector bosons can be produced gravitationally through quantum fluctuations during inflation; if these particles are feebly coupled and cosmologically metastable, they can account for the observed dark matter abundance. However, in…
Cosmological scenarios with a non-standard equation of state can involve ultrastiff fluids, understood as primordial fluids for which $p/\rho> 1$. Their energy densities can dominate the Universe energy budget at early times, in the…
Mirror matter is a promising self-collisional dark matter candidate. Here we study the evolution of thermodynamical quantities in the early Universe for temperatures below ~100 MeV in presence of a hidden mirror sector with unbroken parity…
We revisit the decoupling of neutrinos in the early universe with flavour oscillations. We rederive the quantum kinetic equations which determine the neutrino evolution based on a BBGKY-like hierarchy, and include for the first time the…
For a cold dark matter (DM) originating from the co-annihilation processes, there will be excited state(s) in the dark sector, that may decay or annihilate away shortly after their freeze-out. In this paper we investigate the impact of the…
As space expands, the energy density in black holes increases relative to that of radiation, providing us with motivation to consider scenarios in which the early universe contained a significant abundance of such objects. In this study, we…
We consider the cosmological effects of sterile neutrinos with the masses of $150- 450$ MeV. The decay of sterile neutrinos changes the thermal history of the Universe and affects the energy density of radiation at the recombination and the…
The existence of prolonged radiation domination prior to the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), starting just after the inflationary epoch, is not yet established unanimously. If instead, the universe undergoes a non-standard cosmological…
We consider the consequences of a matter power spectrum which rises on small scales until eventually being cutoff by microphysical processes associated with the particle nature of dark matter. Evolving the perturbations of a weakly…
Ultralight dark matter interacting with sterile neutrinos would modify the evolution and properties of the cosmic neutrino background through active-sterile neutrino mixing. We investigate how such an interaction would induce a redshift…
In this paper we consider the cosmological implications of dark energy models with a coupled system of a dynamical scalar field (the quintessence) and the neutrinos. By detailed numerical calculations we study the various possibilities on…
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…
We consider a scenario where the inflaton decays to a hidden sector thermally decoupled from the visible Standard Model sector. A tiny portal coupling between the hidden and the visible sectors later heats the visible sector so that the…
Measurements of the primordial element abundances provide us with an important probe of our universe's early thermal history, allowing us to constrain the expansion rate and composition of our universe as early as $\sim 1 \, {\rm s}$ after…