Related papers: The Physics of Light Relics
Turbulence may have been produced in the early universe during several kind of non-equilibrium processes. Periods of cosmic turbulence may have left a detectable relic in the form of stochastic backgrounds of gravitational waves. In this…
New measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by the Planck mission have greatly increased our knowledge about the Universe. Dark radiation, a weakly interacting component of radiation, is one of the important ingredients in our…
Cosmology is living through fascinating times, where new observations from ground and space telescopes are questioning the established paradigm, the so-called Lambda Cold Dark Matter model. The particle nature of Dark Matter is severely…
Relic neutrinos from the Big Bang decoupled from the hot plasma predominantly in helicity eigenstates. Their subsequent propagation through gravitational inhomogeneities of the Universe alters the helicities of both Dirac and Majorana…
The possibility that the Fermi scale is the only fundamental energy scale of Nature is under serious consideration at present, yet cosmic rays may already have provided direct evidence of new physics at a much higher scale. The recent…
Based on the cosmological observations, the baryon and dark matter energy densities are similar. There may exist an asymmetry between the dark matter particles and their corresponding anti--particles. We review the relic density of…
The Standard Model is in good shape, apart possibly from g_\mu - 2 and some niggling doubts about the electroweak data. Something like a Higgs boson is required to provide particle masses, but theorists are actively considering…
During its early evolution, the hot, dense Universe provided a laboratory for probing fundamental physics at high energies. By studying the relics from those early epochs, such as the light elements synthesized during primordial…
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…
The highly successful Standard Model is not complete. It does not explain the baryonic asymmetry in the Universe, the existence of dark matter or the non-zero masses of the neutrinos. Extensions of the Standard Model that propose the…
The evidence for the existence of dark matter in the universe is reviewed. A general picture emerges, where both baryonic and non-baryonic dark matter is needed to explain current observations. In particular, a wealth of observational…
Future neutrino and cosmological experiments will perform powerful searches for new light particles. After a general introduction we discuss how a new light fermion (`sterile neutrino') could manifest.
The relic cosmic background neutrinos accompanying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons may hide a universal lepton asymmetry orders of magnitude larger than the universal baryon asymmetry. At present, the only direct way to probe…
We calculate the relic density of very heavy, stable scalar neutrinos in the minimal supersymmetric standard model. We include all two-body final states, as well as the effects of co-annihilation with scalar electrons. We find that the…
The discovery of neutrino masses suggests the likely existence of gauge singlet fermions that participate in the neutrino mass generation via the seesaw mechanism. The masses of the corresponding degrees of freedom can range from well below…
Relic neutrinos play an important role in the evolution of the Universe, modifying some of the cosmological observables. We summarize the main aspects of cosmological neutrinos and describe how the precision of present cosmological data can…
In recent years precision cosmology has become an increasingly powerful probe of particle physics. Perhaps the prime example of this is the very stringent cosmological upper bound on the neutrino mass. However, other aspects of neutrino…
The precision era of multi-messenger astronomy, together with modern astrophysical, cosmological, and gravitational wave observations, increasingly points toward the existence of a ``dark" sector that cannot be explained within the…
Cosmology is at present one of the most powerful probes of neutrino properties. The advent of precision data from the cosmic microwave background and large scale structure has allowed for a very strong bound on the neutrino mass. Here, I…
The discovery of the Standard Model Higgs boson opens up a range of speculative cosmological scenarios, from the formation of structure in the early universe immediately after the big bang, to relics from the electroweak phase transition…