Related papers: The Physics of Light Relics
The Cosmic Neutrino Background is a prediction of the standard cosmological model, but it has been never observed directly. Experiments with the aim of detecting relic CNB neutrinos are under development. For such experiments, the expected…
The relic cosmological abundance of stable or long-lived neutral colored particles gets reduced by about a few orders of magnitude by annihilations that occur after QCD confinement. We compute the abundance and the cosmological bounds on…
We study the cosmological signatures of new light relics that are collisionless like standard neutrinos or are strongly interacting. We provide a simple and succinct rephrasing of their physical effects in the cosmic microwave background,…
The connection between cosmological observations and neutrino physics is discussed in detail. Neutrinos decouple from thermal contact in the early Universe at a temperature of order 1 MeV which coincides with the temperature where light…
After a short review of the arguments for the existence of Particle Dark Matter in the Universe, I list the most plausible candidates provided by particle physics, i.e. neutrinos, axions, and WIMPs. In each case I briefly describe how to…
Within the context of hot big-bang cosmology, a cosmic background of presently low energy neutrinos is predicted to exist in concert with the photons of the cosmic background radiation. The number density of the cosmological neutrinos is of…
We derive general constraints on the relic abundances of a long-lived particle which mainly decays into a neutrino (and something else) at cosmological time scales. Such an exotic particle may show up in various particle-physics models…
In models of coupled dark energy and dark matter the mass of the dark matter particle depends on the cosmological evolution of the dark energy field. In this note we exemplify in a simple model the effects of this mass variation on the…
During its early evolution the Universe provided a laboratory to probe fundamental physics at high energies. Relics from those early epochs, such as the light elements synthesized during primordial nucleosynthesis when the Universe was only…
Cosmological bounds on neutrinos and additional hypothetical light thermal relics, such as QCD axions, are currently among the most restrictive ones. These limits mainly rely on Cosmic Microwave Background temperature anisotropies.…
We report on the main results presented at the workshop on The Physics of Relic Neutrinos. The study of relic neutrinos involves a broad spectrum of problems in particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Features of baryogenesis and…
After a short introduction on particle candidates for dark matter within possible extensions of the standard model, we concentrate on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, and on one of their most interesting physical realizations: the…
The discovery of neutrino masses implies the existence of new particles, the sterile neutrinos. These particles can have important implications for cosmology and astrophysics. A sterile neutrino with mass of a few keV can account for the…
In this thesis we will address three different phenomena related to neutrino physics: mass models, detection of the cosmic neutrino background and the neutrino background in Dark Matter searches, considering the different characteristics in…
Recent measurements of cosmological parameters from the microwave background radiation, type Ia supernovae, and the age of globular clusters help determine the relic matter density in the universe. It is first shown with mild cosmological…
The thermal relic abundance of species critically depends on the assumed underlying cosmological model. In the case of neutralinos, freeze-out takes place long before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, which provides the strongest constraint on the…
Many theoretically well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics predict the existence of the axion and further ultralight axion-like particles. They may constitute the mysterious dark matter in the universe and solve…
We study gravitational lensing of the cosmic neutrino background. This signal is undetectable for the foreseeable future, but there is a rich trove of information available. At least some of the neutrinos from the early universe will be…
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 consider the possibility that a large fraction of the ultrahigh energy cosmic rays are decay products of Z bosons which were produced in the scattering of ultrahigh energy cosmic neutrinos on cosmological relic neutrinos. We compare the…