相关论文: Neutrino-Dark Sector Equilibration and Primordial …
Light, weakly-coupled dark sectors may be naturally decoupled in the early universe and enter equilibrium with the Standard Model bath during the epoch of primordial nucleosynthesis. The equilibration and eventual decoupling of dark sector…
Light dark-matter ($M\leq20$ MeV) particles freeze out after neutrino decoupling. If the dark-matter particle couples to a neutrino or an electromagnetic plasma, the late time entropy production from dark-matter annihilation can change the…
Thermal dark matter that couples more strongly to electrons and photons than to neutrinos will heat the electron-photon plasma relative to the neutrino background if it becomes nonrelativistic after the neutrinos decouple from the thermal…
A light ($m_{\nu d} \lesssim $ MeV) dark fermion mixing with the Standard Model neutrinos can naturally equilibrate with the neutrinos via oscillations and scattering. In the presence of dark sector interactions, production of dark fermions…
The connection between cosmological observations and neutrino physics is discussed in detail. Neutrinos decouple from thermal contact in the early Universe at a temperature of order 1 MeV which coincides with the temperature where light…
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…
The effect of neutrino cooling of possible primary regions filled by the hot matter is discussed. Such regions could contain the primordial density inhomogeneities of different origin and survive up to modern epoch. We show that the final…
A calculation of neutrino decoupling in the early Universe, including full Fermi-Dirac statistics and electron mass dependence in the weak reaction rates, is presented. We find that after decoupling, the electron neutrinos contribute 0.83\%…
Any light relic which was in thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model before it freezes out results in a shift in the effective number of neutrino species, $N_{eff}$. This quantity is being measured with increasing precision, and planned…
Thermal dark matter at the MeV mass-scale has its abundance set during the highly non-trivial epochs of neutrino decoupling and electron annihilation. The technical obstacles attached to solving Boltzmann equations of multiple interacting…
It has been suggested that a sterile neutrino \nu_s which mixes with standard neutrinos can form nonthermal ``cool'' Dark Matter if its mass and mixing angle fall in the ranges 0.1 keV \lsim m_s \lsim 10 keV and 10^{-10} \lsim \sin^2 \theta…
We investigate the impact of a nonstandard electron mass $m_e$ on early-Universe thermal history, focusing on neutrino decoupling and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). In the standard cosmology, neutrino--electron interactions keep neutrinos…
Models of stepped dark radiation have recently been found to have an important impact on the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background, aiding in easing the Hubble tension. In this work, we study models with a sector of dark radiation…
Recent work on increasing the effective number of neutrino species (Neff) in the early universe has focussed on introducing extra relativistic species (`dark radiation'). We draw attention to another possibility: a new particle of mass less…
We study the impact of an early dark energy component (EDE) present during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) on the elemental abundances of deuterium D/H, and helium $Y_p$, as well as the effective relativistic degrees of freedom $N_{\rm…
Thermal freeze-out offers an attractive explanation of the dark matter density free from fine-tuning of initial conditions. For dark matter with a mass below tens of MeV, photons, electrons, and neutrinos are the only available direct…
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…
The number of effective relativistic neutrino species represents a fundamental probe of the thermal history of the early Universe, and as such of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Traditional approaches to the neutrino decoupling are…
We consider relatively heavy neutrinos $\nu_H$, mostly contributing to a sterile state $\nu_s$, with mass in the range 10 MeV $\lesssim m_s \lesssim m_{\pi} \sim 135$ MeV, which are thermally produced in the early universe in collisional…
Short baseline neutrino experiments such as LSND and MiniBooNE seem to suggest the existence of light sterile neutrinos. Meanwhile, current cosmic microwave background (CMB) and big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) measurements place an upper…