Related papers: Cosmological Constraints on Light (but Massive) Re…
A massive particle decaying into neutrinos in the early Universe is known to be less constrained than if it was decaying into other standard model particles. However, even if the decay proceeds into neutrinos, the latter still inevitably…
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…
With the advent of precision data, cosmology has become an extremely powerful tool for probing particle physics. The prime example of this is the cosmological bound on light neutrino masses. Here I review the current status of cosmological…
We have derived new bounds on the relativistic energy density in the Universe from cosmic microwave background (CMB), large scale structure (LSS), and type Ia supernova (SNI-a) observations. In terms of the effective number of neutrino…
Dark matter constitutes roughly one-fourth of the Universe, yet its physical nature remains unknown. Warm dark matter (WDM), a class of dark matter candidates, has non-negligible velocity dispersion that suppresses the formation of…
The presence of light thermally coupled dark matter affects early expansion history and production of light elements during the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Specifically, dark matter that annihilates into Standard Model particles can modify…
A thermal relic, often referred to as a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), is a particle produced during the early evolution of the Universe whose present (relic) abundance depends only on its mass and its thermally averaged…
We present results of cosmological N-body hydrodynamic chemistry simulations of primordial structure growth and evolution in a scenario with warm dark matter (WDM) having a mass of 3 keV (thermal relic) and compare with a model consisting…
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…
The small-scale power spectrum of the cosmological matter distribution together with other cosmological data provides a sensitive measure of the hot dark matter fraction, leading to restrictive neutrino mass limits. We extend this argument…
It is usually assumed that relic neutrinos possess a Fermi-Dirac distribution, acquired during thermal equilibrium in the Early Universe. However, various mechanisms could introduce strong distortions in this distribution. We perform a…
We combine the most recent observations of large-scale structure (2dF and SDSS galaxy surveys) and cosmic microwave anisotropies (WMAP and ACBAR) to put constraints on flat cosmological models where the number of massive neutrinos and of…
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…
The relic abundance and the scalar cross-section off nucleon for light neutralinos (of mass below about 45 GeV) are evaluated in an effective MSSM model without GUT-inspired relations among gaugino masses. It is shown that these neutralinos…
Massive neutrinos suppress the growth of cosmic structure on small, non-linear, scales. It is thus often proposed that using statistics beyond the power spectrum can tighten constraints on the neutrino mass by extracting additional…
We derive joint constraints on the warm dark matter (WDM) half-mode scale by combining the analyses of a selection of astrophysical probes: strong gravitational lensing with extended sources, the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest, and the number of…
The expansion history and thermal physical process that happened in the early Universe before big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) remains relatively unconstrained by observations. Low reheating temperature universes with normalcy temperatures of…
The relic abundances of the light elements synthesized during the first few minutes of the evolution of the Universe provide unique probes of cosmology and the building blocks for stellar and galactic chemical evolution, while also enabling…
We reconsider the model of Minimal Dark Matter (a fermionic, hypercharge-less quintuplet of the EW interactions) and compute its gamma ray signatures. We compare them with a number of gamma ray probes: the galactic halo diffuse…
The thermal history of the universe before the epoch of nucleosynthesis is unknown. The maximum temperature in the radiation-dominated era, which we will refer to as the reheat temperature, may have been as low as 0.7 MeV. In this paper we…