Related papers: How Many Dark Neutrino Sectors Does Cosmology Allo…
The existence of neutrino mass and mixing is a strong pointer towards physics beyond the standard model. An overview of the possibility of having neutrino masses in supersymmetric theories is attempted here. Some of the recent works…
New results, namely the independent determination of the deuterium abundance in several quasar absorption systems, and the complementary determination of the cosmological baryon density by observations of anisotropies in the cosmic…
Is Dark Matter part of a Dark Sector? The possibility of a dark sector neutral under Standard Model (SM) forces furnishes an attractive explanation for the existence of Dark Matter (DM), and is a compelling new-physics direction to explore…
We investigate our knowledge of early universe cosmology by exploring how much additional energy density can be placed in different components beyond those in the $\Lambda$CDM model. To do this we use a method to separate early- and…
As cosmology has entered a phase of precision experiments, the content of the universe has been established to contain interesting and not yet fully understood components, namely dark energy and dark matter. While the cause and exact nature…
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…
The case for small neutrino mass differences from atmospheric and solar neutrino oscillation experiments has become compelling, but leaves the overall neutrino mass scale m_nu undetermined. The most restrictive limit of m_nu < 0.8 eV arises…
The latest cosmological constraints on the sum of the neutrino masses depend on prior physical assumptions about the mass spectrum. To test the accordance of cosmological and laboratory constraints in the absence of such priors, we…
The Standard Model of particle physics is governed by Poincar\'e symmetry, while all other symmetries, exact or approximate, are essentially dictated by theoretical consistency with the particle spectrum. On the other hand, many models of…
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…
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 most important problem in fundamental physics is the description of the contents of the Universe. Today, we know that 95% thereof is totally unknown. Two thirds of that amount is the mysterious Dark Energy described in an interesting…
We examine the dark energy and matter densities allowed by precision measurements of distances out to various redshifts, in the presence of spatial curvature and (near) arbitrary behavior of the dark energy equation of state. Degeneracies…
Dark matter is a vital component of the current best model of our universe, $\Lambda$CDM. There are leading candidates for what the dark matter could be (e.g. weakly-interacting massive particles, or axions), but no compelling observational…
It is now clear that the masses of the neutrino sector are much lighter than those of the other three sectors.There are many attempts to explain the neutrino masses radiatively by means of inert Higgses, which don't have vacuum expectation…
Ever since the discovery of neutron stars it has been realized that they serve as probes of a physical regime that cannot be accessed in laboratories: strongly degenerate matter at several times nuclear saturation density. Existing nuclear…
The cosmological significance of the neutralino sector is studied for a class of models in which electroweak symmetry breaking is seeded by a gauge singlet. Extensive use is made of the renormalisation group equations to significantly…
When combining cosmological and oscillations results to constrain the neutrino sector, the question of the propagation of systematic uncertainties is often raised. We address this issue in the context of the derivation of an upper bound on…
Given the wealth of increasingly accurate cosmological observations, especially the recent results from the WMAP, and the development of methods and strategies in the search for cosmic topology, it is reasonable to expect that we should be…
Six challenges for the standard cosmological model $\Lambda$CDM are listed, which arise when comparing theoretical predictions with observational data on scales of ~1 Mpc. Different parameters of luminous and dwarf galaxies in the local…