Related papers: How new physics affects primordial neutrinos decou…
This thesis treats the topic of CMB Spectral Distortions (SDs), which represent any deviation from a pure black body shape of the CMB energy spectrum. As such, they can be used to probe the inflationary, expansion and thermal evolution of…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provides a precious window on fundamental physics at very high energy scales, possibly including quantum gravity, GUTs and supersymmetry. The CMB has already enabled defect-based rivals to inflation to…
Quasi-N-body simulations, such as FastPM, provide a fast way to simulate cosmological structure formation, but have yet to adequately include the effects of massive neutrinos. We present a method to include neutrino particles in FastPM,…
The presence of light (m_a ~ 10^-6 ev) scalar fields in the early universe can modify the cosmology of neutrinos considerably by allowing their masses to vary on cosmological times. In this paper, we consider the effect of Planck-suppressed…
Neutrinos are the least known particle in the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. They play a crucial role in cosmology, governing the universe's evolution and shaping the large-scale structures we observe today. In this chapter,…
We consider heavy sterile neutrinos $\nu_s$, with mass in the range 10 MeV $\lesssim m_s \lesssim m_{\pi} \sim 135$ MeV, thermally produced in the early universe and freezing out after the QCD phase transition. The existence of these…
The next generation of cosmological surveys are expected to measure a non-zero sum of neutrino masses, even down to the minimum value of 58 meV inferred from neutrino flavor oscillation. The implications of such a measurement for the…
New interactions of neutrinos can stop them from free streaming in the early Universe even after the weak decoupling epoch. This results in the enhancement of the primordial gravitational wave amplitude on small scales compared to the…
The non-zero mass of neutrinos suppresses the growth of cosmic structure on small scales. Since the level of suppression depends on the sum of the masses of the three active neutrino species, the evolution of large-scale structure is a…
Neutrinos that decay leave their imprint on the cosmic microwave background. We calculate the CMB anisotropy for the full range of decaying neutrino parameter space, and investigate the ability of future experiments like MAP and Planck to…
A quintessence scalar field or cosmon interacting with neutrinos can have important effects on cosmological structure formation. Within growing neutrino models the coupling becomes effective only in recent times, when neutrinos become…
Ultracold neutrons (UCN) with kinetic energies up to 300 neV can be stored in material or magnetic confinements for hundreds of seconds. This makes them a very useful tool for probing fundamental symmetries of nature, by searching for…
Tantalizing cosmological and terrestrial evidence suggests the number of light neutrinos may be greater than 3, motivating a careful re-examination of cosmological bounds on extra light species. Big Bang Nucleosynthesis constrains the…
As a physical and sufficient compression of the full CMB data, the CMB distance priors, or shift parameters, have been widely used and provide a convenient way to include CMB data when obtaining cosmological constraints. In this paper, we…
The majoron, a pseudo-Goldstone boson arising from the spontaneous breaking of global lepton number, is a generic feature of many models intended to explain the origin of the small neutrino masses. In this work, we investigate potential…
The set-up of the initial conditions in cosmological N-body simulations is usually implemented by rescaling the desired low-redshift linear power spectrum to the required starting redshift consistently with the Newtonian evolution of the…
We study the effects of modifications of gravity after Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) which would manifest themselves mainly before recombination. We consider their effects on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation and on the…
The cosmic neutrino background is both a dramatic prediction of the hot Big Bang and a compelling target for current and future observations. The impact of relativistic neutrinos in the early universe has been observed at high significance…
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 physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of processes, still finding potentially measurable…