Related papers: From Little Bangs to the Big Bang
The early universe provides a unique laboratory for probing the frontiers of particle physics in general and neutrino physics in particular. The primordial abundances of the relic nuclei produced during the first few minutes of the…
Various mechanisms have been suggested for the formation of Primordial Black Holes (PBHs), and this thesis focuses on the standard mechanism based on the critical collapse of cosmological fluctuations. The underlying idea is that during…
Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…
We illustrate, via a simplified model, a scenario in which the baryon-asymmetry and, possibly the dark matter component of the Universe are simultaneously generated by the decay of a WIMP-like mother particle, in turn produced non-thermally…
The expansion of our universe, when followed backward in time, implies that it emerged from a phase of huge density, the big bang. These stages are so extreme that classical general relativity combined with matter theories is not able to…
Cosmology requires new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles and fields. What is the fundamental physics behind dark matter and dark energy? What generated the initial fluctuations in the early Universe? Polarised light…
The nature of the first generation of stars in the Universe remains largely unknown. Observations imply the existence of massive primordial stars early in the history of the universe, and the standard theory for the growth of cosmic…
Observations of the interstellar medium by the Herschel, Planck etc. infrared satellites throw doubt on standard {\Lambda}CDMHC cosmological processes to form gravitational structures. According to the Hydro-Gravitational-Dynamics (HGD)…
This article gives a brief qualitative description of the possible evolution of the early Universe between the end of an inflationary epoch and the end of Big Bang nucleosynthesis. After a general introduction, establishing the minimum…
There are at least three sources of cosmic quarks in the universe. One, the quark nuggets which may survive beyond a certain baryon number during the phase transition from quarks to hadrons microseconds after the big bang. These quark…
Dark matter is a fundamental constituent of the universe, which is needed to explain a wide variety of astrophysical and cosmological observations. Although the existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly a century ago and its…
The $\Lambda$CDM scenario to form galaxies encounters many problems when confronted with observations, namely the prediction of dark matter cusps in all galaxies, and in particular in dwarf irregulars, dominated by dark matter, or the low…
The local Lorentz and diffeomorphism symmetries of Einstein's gravitational theory are spontaneously broken by a Higgs mechanism by invoking a phase transition in the early Universe, at a critical temperature $T_c$ below which the symmetry…
Dark matter could be composed by black-hole remnants formed before the big-bang era in a bouncing cosmology. This hypothetical scenario has major implications on the issue of the arrow of time: it would upset a common attribution of past…
Within the first 20 minutes of the evolution of the hot, dense, early Universe, astrophysically interesting abundances of deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7 were synthesized by the cosmic nuclear reactor. The primordial abundances…
The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical…
Multiple astrophysical and cosmological observations show that the majority of the matter in the universe is non-luminous. It is not made of known particles, and it is called dark matter. This is one of the few pieces of concrete…
In the first thousand seconds of its evolution the Universe was a primordial nuclear reactor synthesizing the nuclides D, $^3$He, $^4$He and $^7$Li. These messengers from the Big Bang provide a unique window on the early, hot, dense…
Measurements of the primordial element abundances provide us with an important probe of our universe's early thermal history, allowing us to constrain the expansion rate and composition of our universe as early as $\sim 1 \, {\rm s}$ after…
Dark matter(DM) is the only possible candidate which would be apart from the thermal equilibrium before Big Bang nucleosynthesis(BBN) in accordance with current DM searches. In this work, we report a generic scenario that primordial…