Related papers: Comprehensive Constraints on Dark Radiation Inject…
We examine Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) in the case of inhomogenous neutrino degeneracy, in the limit where the fluctuations are sufficiently small on large length scales that the present-day element abundances are homogeneous. We…
Current constraints on energy injection in the form of energetic particles before the epoch of recombination using CMB spectral distortions assume that all energy goes into $y$ and $\mu$-type distortions. We revisit these constraints with…
We consider the effects on big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) of the radiative decay of a long-lived massive particle. If high-energy photons are emitted after the BBN epoch ($t \sim 1 - 10^3$ sec), they may change the abundances of the light…
We examine constraints from Big Bang nucleosynthesis on type II Randall-Sundrum brane cosmologies with both a dark radiation component and a quadratic term that depends on the 5-dimensional Planck mass, M_5. Using limits on the abundances…
Big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have a long history together in the standard cosmology. The general concordance between the predicted and observed light element abundances provides a direct probe of…
Decaying cold dark matter (CDM) has been considered as a mechanism to tackle the tensions in the Hubble expansion rate and the clustering of matter. However, polarization measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) severely…
Primordial nucleosynthesis provides a probe of the universal abundance of baryons when the universe was only a few minutes old. Recent observations of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) probe the baryon abundance when the…
New light states thermally coupled to the Standard Model plasma alter the expansion history of the Universe and impact the synthesis of the primordial light elements. In this work, we carry out an exhaustive and precise analysis of the…
We revisit cosmological neutrino mass bounds when a fraction of dark matter is allowed to decay to massless dark radiation. By compensating the late-time increase in the matter density induced by neutrinos becoming non-relativistic,…
The primordial abundance of deuterium produced during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) depends sensitively on the universal ratio of baryons to photons, an important cosmological parameter probed independently by the Cosmic Microwave…
We present a complete analysis of the cosmological constraints on decaying dark matter. Previous analyses have used the cosmic microwave background and Type Ia supernova. We have updated them with the latest data as well as extended the…
In this paper we update the constraints on the simple decaying cold dark matter (DCDM) model with dark radiation (DR) as decay product. We consider two different regimes of the lifetime, i.e. short-lived and long-lived, and use the most…
Recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) results from the Planck satellite, combined with previous CMB data and Hubble constant measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope, provide a constraint on the effective number of relativistic…
We study a phenomenological class of models where dark matter converts to dark radiation in the low redshift epoch. This class of models, dubbed DMDR, characterizes the evolution of comoving dark matter density with two extra parameters,…
A new observation of D in a primordial gas cloud, made using the high resolution spectrograph at the Keck telescope, indicates an abundance $ D/H =(1.9-2.5) \times 10^{-4}$ \cite{SCHR}. Since deuterium is destroyed by stars, and the…
We present a model-independent null test of the late-time cosmological response to a reduced sound horizon, as typically required by early-universe solutions to the Hubble tension. In this approach, we phenomenologically impose a shorter…
We consider particle decays during the cosmic dark ages with two aims: (1) to explain the high optical depth reported by WMAP, and (2) to provide new constraints to the parameter space for decaying particles. We delineate the decay channels…
We investigate the impact of residual annihilation from sub-GeV mass thermal relic dark matter candidates during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). Focusing on candidates with $p$-wave annihilation channels, we show that the hadronic injection…
Damping of magnetic fields via ambipolar diffusion and decay of magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) turbulence in the post decoupling era heats the intergalactic medium (IGM). Delayed recombination of hydrogen atoms in the IGM yields an optical…
We show how recent data from observations of the cosmic microwave background may suggest the presence of additional radiation density which appeared after big bang nucleosynthesis. We propose a general scheme by which this radiation could…