Related papers: Cosmic Connections
These lectures aim to highlight the remarkable symbiosis that currently exists between the physics of the very small and the physics of the very large, using the unsolved puzzle of the nature of Dark Energy as a vehicle for so doing. The…
Strongly-interacting dark matter can be accumulated in large quantities inside the Earth, and for dark matter particles in a few GeV mass range, it can exist in large quantities near the Earth's surface. We investigate the constraints…
The quark matter may have great implications in astrophysical studies, which could appear in the early Universe, in compact stars, and/or as cosmic rays. After a general review of astrophysical quark matter, the density-dominated quark…
We explore the physics of a gas of particles interacting with a condensate that spontaneously breaks Lorentz invariance. The equation of state of this gas varies from 1/3 to less than -1 and can lead to the observed cosmic acceleration. The…
We investigate realistic models of compact objects, focusing on neutron and strange stars, composed by dense matter and dark energy in the form of a simple fluid or scalar field interacting with matter. For the dark energy component, we use…
Cosmological models with two interacting fluids, each satisfying the strong energy condition, are studied in the framework of classical General Relativity. If the interactions are phenomenologically described by a power law in the scale…
I examine some recent findings in cosmology and their potential implications for the emergence of life in the universe. In particular, I discuss the requirements for carbon-based life, anthropic considerations with respect to the nature of…
Models where Dark Matter and Dark Energy interact with each other have been proposed to solve the coincidence problem. We review the motivations underlying the need to introduce such interaction, its influence on the background dynamics and…
We report on recent results on particle mixing and oscillations in quantum field theory. We discuss the role played in cosmology by the vacuum condensate induced by the neutrino mixing phenomenon. We show that it can contribute to the dark…
Understanding the properties and physical phase of the dense strongly interacting matter present in the cores of neutron stars or created in their binary mergers remains one of the most prominent open problems in nuclear astrophysics. While…
Quantum gravity may shed light on the prehistory of the universe. Quantum corrections to gravity affect the dynamics of the expansion of the universe. Their influence is studied on the example of the exactly solvable quantum model. The…
Most of our knowledge of the universe has been obtained from the anisotropy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and observations of large-scale structures. During the history of the Universe, neutrinos from the early Universe evolve…
An unexpected explanation for neutrino mass, Dark Matter (DM) and Dark Energy (DE) from genuine Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) of the Standard Model (SM) is proposed here, while the strong CP problem is resolved without any need to account…
Cosmology now provides unambiguous, quantitative evidence for new particle physics. I discuss the implications of cosmology for supersymmetry and vice versa. Topics include: motivations for supersymmetry; supersymmetry breaking; dark…
Coherent states consist of superposition of infinite number of particles and do not have a classical analogue. We study their evolution in a FLRW cosmology and show that only when full quantum corrections are considered, they may survive…
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…
This write--up gives a rather elementary introduction into particle physics aspects of the cosmological Dark Matter puzzle. A fairly comprehensive list of possible candidates is given; in each case the production mechanism and possible ways…
Recent years have seen dramatic progress in cosmology and particle astrophysics. So much so that anyone who dares to offer an overview would certainly risk him- or herself for being incomplete and biased at best, and even incorrect due to…
The quest to understand the nature dark matter is one of the most relevant ones in Particle Physics nowadays, since it constitutes most of the matter of the Universe and it is still unknown what it is made of. In order to answer to this…
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,…