Related papers: What is the lowest possible reheating temperature?
One still cannot conclusively assert that the universe underwent a neutral phase, despite the new COBE FIRAS limit y<0.000025 on Compton y-distortions of the cosmic microwave background. Although scenarios where the very early (z=1000)…
Recent years have brought more precise temperature measurements of the low-density intergalactic medium (IGM). These new measurements constrain the processes that heated the IGM, such as the reionization of H I and of He II. We present a…
We show that the new measurement of the effective number of neutrinos Neff by the Planck satellite can be used to set a robust lower bound on the mass of cold thermal dark matter of O(MeV). Our limit applies if the dark matter remains in…
We present for smooth non-oscillating backgrounds an analytic formula which calculates the energy density of massive and massless particles created via gravitational particle production, thus giving the corresponding reheating temperature.…
In many models of inflation, reheating is realized through a coupling between the inflaton and the Higgs boson. Often, the mass of the inflaton is of order $10^{13}~$GeV determined by the amplitude of the scalar fluctuation spectrum.…
We describe how difficult it is to realise baryogenesis in models where the fundamental scale in nature is as low as TeV. The problem becomes even more challenging if we assume that there are only {\it two} extra compact spatial dimensions,…
The temperature at the end of reheating and the length of this cosmological phase can be bound to the inflationary observables if one considers the cosmological evolution from the time of Hubble crossing until today. There are many examples…
We discuss baryogenesis in scenarios where the Universe is reheated to temperatures $\lesssim 100\,$GeV by the decay of long-lived massive particles into energetic SM particles. Before its thermalization, the center-of-mass energy in…
Standard Model neutrinos are not usually considered plausible dark matter candidates because the usual treatment of their decoupling in the early universe implies that their mass must be sufficiently small to make them ``hot'' dark matter.…
In an approach to noncommutative gauge theories, where the full noncommutative behavior is delimited by the presence of the UV and IR cutoffs, we consider the possibility of describing a system at a temperature T in a box of size L.…
We derive constraint on the effective number of neutrino species N_nu from the cosmic microwave background power spectrum of the WMAP and galaxy clustering power spectrum of the SDSS luminous red galaxies (LRGs). Using these two latest data…
Among primordial magnetogenesis models, inflation is a prime candidate to explain the current existence of cosmological magnetic fields. Assuming conformal invariance to be restored after inflation, their energy density decreases as…
Small Recent theories have proposed a variety of massive particles, like the moduli, whose abundance or decay endangers standard cosmological results. To dilute them, thermal inflation has been proposed, with its own massive scalar flaton…
In warm dark matter scenarios structure formation is suppressed on small scales with respect to the cold dark matter case, reducing the number of low-mass halos and the fraction of ionized gas at high redshifts and thus, delaying…
The relic abundance of thermal dark matter particles is generally assumed to be inversely proportional to their annihilation rate, which is therefore constrained by the present matter density, <sigma v> ~ 10^{-26} Omega_{dm}^{-1} cm^3…
Thermal relics lighter than an MeV contribute to the energy density of the universe at the time of nucleosynthesis and recombination. Constraints on extra radiation degrees of freedom typically exclude even the simplest of such dark…
It is argued that the entropy bound places an upper limit of about 1 TeV on the temperature of the last reheating era in the early Universe. Implications for inflation and non-standard paradigms for beyond the standard model of hot…
We present a detailed study of the finite-temperature behaviour of the LARGE Volume type IIB flux compactifications. We show that certain moduli can thermalise at high temperatures. Despite that, their contribution to the finite-temperature…
Many compactifications of higher-dimensional supersymmetric theories have approximate vacuum degeneracy. The associated moduli fields are stabilized by non-perturbative effects which break supersymmetry. We show that at finite temperature…
Intergalactic medium temperature is a powerful probe of the epoch of reionisation, as information is retained long after reionisation itself. However, mean temperatures are highly degenerate with the timing of reionisation, with the amount…