Related papers: Cosmology in a non-standard statistical background
In the last few decades, advances in observational cosmology have given us a standard model of cosmology. We know the content of the universe to within a few percent. With more ambitious experiments on the way, we hope to move beyond the…
We update a previous investigation of cosmological effects of a non-standard interaction between neutrinos and dark matter. Parameterizing the elastic-scattering cross section between the two species as a function of the temperature of the…
We briefly describe the cosmological lithium problems followed by a summary of our recent theoretical work on the magnitude of the effects of electron screening, the possible existence of dark matter parallel universes and the use of…
We present a detailed study of cosmological effects of homogeneous tachyon matter coexisting with non-relativistic matter and radiation, concentrating on the inverse square potential and the exponential potential for the tachyonic scalar…
The neutrino role in primordial nucleosynthesis is reviewed. The importance of nonequilibrium effects is emphasized both for the standard massless and possibly massive neutrinos. The upper bound on tau neutrino mass is presented. A spatial…
We employ state-of-the art cosmological observables including supernova surveys and BAO information to provide constraints on the mass and mixing angle of a non-resonantly produced sterile neutrino species, showing that cosmology can…
I review the challenges and problems facing the standard cosmological model, involving an $\Omega=1$ Universe dominated by non-baryonic dark matter, which arise due to: age estimates of the universe, estimates of the baryon fraction of the…
We investigate the effect of potentially large distortions of the relic neutrino spectra on cosmological observables. To that end, we consider a phenomenological model of "gray" spectral distributions, described by a single parameter, which…
It has been claimed that the standard model of cosmology (LCDM) cannot easily account for a number of observations on relatively small scales, motivating extensions to the standard model. Here we introduce a new suite of cosmological…
The accelerating expansion of the universe presents an exciting, fundamental challenge to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. I highlight some of the outstanding challenges in both developing theoretical models and…
We reexamine the recently proposed "little inflation" scenario that allows for a strong first order phase-transition of QCD at non-negligible baryon number in the early universe and its possible observable consequences. The scenario is…
We present numerical relativity simulations of cosmological scenarios in which the universe is smoothed and flattened by undergoing a phase of slow contraction and test their sensitivity to a wide range of initial conditions. Our numerical…
We are at a specific period of modern cosmology, during which the large increase of the amount of data leads to the idea that the determination of cosmological parameters has been achieved with a rather good precision. There is a large…
One of the main challenges in cosmology is to quantify how small density fluctuations at the recombination epoch z around 1000 evolved into the galaxies and the large-scale structure we observe in the universe today. This thesis discusses…
We quantify two main pathways through which baryonic physics biases cluster count cosmology. We create mock cluster samples that reproduce the baryon content inferred from X-ray observations. We link clusters to their counterparts in a dark…
We solve the Boltzmann equation for cosmological neutrinos around the epoch of the electron-positron annihilation in order to verify the freeze-out approximation and to compute accurately the cosmological neutrino distribution function. We…
Dark matter interactions with electrons or protons during the early Universe leave imprints on the cosmic microwave background and the matter power spectrum, and can be probed through cosmological and astrophysical observations. These…
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) relates key cosmological parameters to the primordial abundance of light elements. In this paper, we point out that the recent observations of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies by the Planck satellite…
Deviations from unitarity in the three-neutrino mixing canonical picture are expected in many physics scenarios beyond the Standard Model. The mixing of new heavy neutral leptons with the three light neutrinos would in principle modify the…
A critical review is given of the current status of cosmological nucleosynthesis. In the framework of the Standard Model with 3 types of relativistic neutrinos, the baryon-to-photon ratio, $\eta$, corresponding to the inferred primordial…