Related papers: A Limit on the Total Lepton Number in the Universe…
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…
In the standard picture of big-bang nucleosynthesis the yields of D, $^3$He, $^4$He, and $^7$Li only agree with their inferred primordial abundances if the fraction of critical density contributed by baryons is between $0.01h^{-2}$ and…
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…
Recent observation of the power spectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation has exhibited that the flat cosmology is most likely. This suggests too large universal baryon-density parameter $\Omega_b h^2 \approx 0.022 \sim 0.030$…
We study three-flavor neutrino oscillations in the early universe in the presence of neutrino chemical potentials. We take into account all effects from the background medium, i.e. collisional damping, the refractive effects from charged…
After a brief discussion of baryon and lepton number nonconservation, we review the status of thermal leptogenesis with GUT scale neutrino masses, as well as low scale alternatives with keV neutrinos as dark matter and heavy neutrino masses…
This paper derives an upper limit on the density $\rho_{\scriptstyle\Lambda}$ of dark energy based on the requirement that cosmological structure forms before being frozen out by the eventual acceleration of the universe. By allowing for…
Dark sectors provide a compelling theoretical framework for thermally producing sub-GeV dark matter, and motivate an expansive new accelerator and direct-detection experimental program. We demonstrate the power of constraining such dark…
The Universe may contain sufficiently small size matter-antimatter domains at temperatures of a few hundred MeV, without violating the success of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We demonstrate that this possibility enhances the keV scale sterile…
We constrain the lifetime of thermally produced Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs) from primordial nucleosynthesis. We show that even a small fraction of mesons present in the primordial plasma leads to the over-production of the primordial…
We examine the sterile neutrino dark matter production in the primordial plasma with lepton asymmetry unequally distributed over different neutrino flavors. We argue that with the specific flavor fractions, one can mitigate limits from 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…
In the standard model neutrinos are assumed to have streamed across the Universe since they last scattered at the weak decoupling epoch when the temperature of the standard-model plasma was ~MeV. The shear stress of free-streaming neutrinos…
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), as one of the earliest processes in the universe accessible to direct observation, offers a powerful and independent probe of the cosmic expansion history. With recent advances in both theory and observation,…
Big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies independently predict the universal baryon density. Comparing their predictions will provide a fundamental test on cosmology. Using BBN and the CMB…
We study the impact of light GeV-scale heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) on Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) in the neutrino-extended Standard Model Effective Field Theory ($\nu$SMEFT). We show that, based on very general considerations, BBN…
We present a model-independent reconstruction of the early expansion and thermal histories of the universe, obtained from light element abundance measurements. The expansion history is tightly constrained around the onset of the Big Bang…
The primordial abundances of the light nuclides produced by Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) during the first 20 minutes in the evolution of the Universe are sensitive to the universal density of baryons and to the expansion rate of the early…
We study the production of sterile neutrinos in the early universe from $\pi \rightarrow l \nu_s$ shortly after the QCD phase transition in the absence of a lepton asymmetry while including finite temperature corrections to the $\pi$ mass…
A search for heavy neutral lepton ($N$) production in $K^+\to e^+N$ decays using the data sample collected by the NA62 experiment at CERN in 2017--2018 is reported. Upper limits of the extended neutrino mixing matrix element $|U_{e4}|^2$…