Related papers: Anthropic Bound on Dark Radiation and its Implicat…
Recent cosmological data analyses hint at the presence of an extra relativistic energy component in the early universe. This component is often parametrized as an excess of the effective neutrino number N_{eff} over the standard value of…
We present a new constraint on the effective number of relativistic species in the early universe, $N_{\rm eff}$, by combining recent primordial helium abundance measurements from the Large Binocular Telescope $Y_p$ Project with primordial…
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…
The cosmic energy density in the form of radiation before and during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is typically parameterized in terms of the effective number of neutrinos N_eff. This quantity, in case of no extra degrees of freedom,…
The radiative component of the Universe has a characteristic impact on both large scale structure (LSS) and the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). We use the recent WMAP data, together with previous CBI data and 2dF matter power…
Any light relic which was in thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model before it freezes out results in a shift in the effective number of neutrino species, $N_{eff}$. This quantity is being measured with increasing precision, and planned…
In the context of models where the dark energy density $\rD$ is a random variable, anthropic selection effects may explain both the "old" cosmological constant problem and the "time coincidence". We argue that this type of solution to both…
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…
The best upper bounds on the masses of stable and unstable light neutrinos derive from the upper bound on the total mass density, as inferred from the lower limit $t_0> 13$ Gyr on the dynamical age of the Universe: If the Universe is…
Recent indications from both particle physics and cosmology suggest the existence of more than three neutrino species. In cosmological analyses the effects of neutrino mass and number of species can in principle be disentangled for fixed…
The vast majority of extensions of the Standard Model affecting the number of effective relativistic neutrino species ($N_{\rm eff}$) do so additively, namely, they enhance this quantity with some light state contributing to dark radiation.…
We consider the inference of the cosmic radiation density, traditionally parameterised as the effective number of neutrino species N_eff, from precision cosmological data. Paying particular attention to systematic effects, notably…
We explore the possibility that exotic forms of dark matter could expose humans on Earth or on prolonged space travel to a significant radiation dose. The radiation exposure from dark matter interacting with nuclei in the human body is…
A range of experimental results point to the existence of a massive neutrino. The recent high precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background and the large scale surveys of galaxies can be used to place an upper bound on this…
We apply phase-space density considerations to obtain lower bounds on the mass of sterile neutrino as dark matter candidate. The bounds are different for non-resonant production, resonant production in the presence of lepton asymmetry and…
In this work, we quantify the cosmological signatures of dark energy radiation -- a novel description of dark energy, which proposes that the dynamical component of dark energy is comprised of a thermal bath of relativistic particles…
The self-interacting neutrino hypothesis is well motivated for addressing the tension between the origin of sterile neutrino dark matter and indirect detection constraints. It can also result in a number of testable signals from the…
Cosmological data have provided new constraints on the number of neutrino species and the neutrino mass. However these constraints depend on assumptions related to the underlying cosmology. Since a correlation is expected between the number…
Hot axions are produced in the early Universe via their interactions with Standard Model particles, contributing to dark radiation commonly parameterized as $\Delta N_{\text{eff}}$. In standard QCD axion benchmark models, this contribution…
We discuss the cosmological degeneracy between the age of the Universe, the Hubble parameter and the effective number of relativistic particles N_eff. We show that independent determinations of the Hubble parameter H(z) as those recently…