Related papers: How Effective is $N_{eff}$ at Discovering Dark Rad…
Light dark-matter ($M\leq20$ MeV) particles freeze out after neutrino decoupling. If the dark-matter particle couples to a neutrino or an electromagnetic plasma, the late time entropy production from dark-matter annihilation can change the…
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.…
Thermal dark matter that couples more strongly to electrons and photons than to neutrinos will heat the electron-photon plasma relative to the neutrino background if it becomes nonrelativistic after the neutrinos decouple from the thermal…
After neutrinos decouple from the photon bath, they can populate a thermal dark sector. If this occurs at a temperature above ~100 keV, this can have measurable impacts on light element abundances. We calculate light element abundances in…
We revisit several aspects of Standard Model physics at finite temperature that drive the theoretical value of the cosmological parameter $N_{\rm eff}$, the effective number of neutrinos in the early universe, away from 3. Our chief focus…
Presence of any extra radiation energy density at the time of cosmic microwave background formation can significantly impact the measurement of the effective relativistic neutrino degrees of freedom or ${\rm \Delta N_{eff}}$ which is very…
The effective number of relativistic neutrino species is a fundamental probe of the early Universe and its measurement represents a key constraint on many scenarios beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. In light of this, an…
Gravitinos are a fundamental prediction of supergravity, their mass ($m_{G}$) is informative of the value of the SUSY breaking scale, and, if produced during reheating, their number density is a function of the reheating temperature…
We investigate the impact of new light particles, carrying significant energy in the early universe after neutrino decoupling, on the cosmological effective relativistic neutrino species, $N_{{\rm eff}}$. If the light particles are produced…
The neutrino energy density of the Universe can be conveniently parametrized in terms of the so-called effective number of neutrinos, N_nu^eff. This parameter enters in several cosmological observables. In particular it is an important…
Recent cosmological measurements favour additional relativistic energy density beyond the one provided by the three active neutrinos and photons of the Standard Model (SM). This is often referred to as "dark radiation", suggesting the need…
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…
Light new vector bosons can be produced gravitationally through quantum fluctuations during inflation; if these particles are feebly coupled and cosmologically metastable, they can account for the observed dark matter abundance. However, in…
It is possible that the strongest interactions between dark matter and the Standard Model occur via the neutrino sector. Unlike gamma rays and charged particles, neutrinos provide a unique avenue to probe for astrophysical sources of dark…
We investigate the impact of neutrino emission via Hawking radiation from primordial black holes (PBHs) on the cosmological effective number of neutrino species, $N_{\mathrm{eff}}$, after neutrino decoupling. By comparing this effect with…
Light, weakly-coupled dark sectors may be naturally decoupled in the early universe and enter equilibrium with the Standard Model bath during the epoch of primordial nucleosynthesis. The equilibration and eventual decoupling of dark sector…
We evaluate the contribution to $N_{\rm eff}$ of the extra sterile states in low-scale Type I seesaw models (with three extra sterile states). We explore the full parameter space and find that at least two of the heavy states always reach…
We present in this work a new calculation of the standard-model benchmark value for the effective number of neutrinos, $N_{\rm eff}^{\rm SM}$, that quantifies the cosmological neutrino-to-photon energy densities. The calculation takes into…
The hot and dense early Universe combined with the promise of high-precision cosmological observations provide an intriguing laboratory for Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics. We simulate the early Universe to examine the effects of the…
What is the upper limit of the mass of the neutralino dark matter whose thermal relic is consistent with the observation? If the neutralino dark matter and colored sparticles are extremely degenerated in mass, with a mass difference less…