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Cosme, C., Figueroa, D. G., & Loayza, N. (2023). Gravitational wave production from preheating with trilinear interactions. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 05(5), 023–30pp.
Abstract: We investigate the production of gravitational waves (GWs) during preheating with monomial/polynomial inflationary potentials, considering a trilinear coupling & phi;x2 between a singlet inflaton & phi; and a daughter scalar field x. For sufficiently large couplings, the trilinear interaction leads to an exponential production of x particles and, as a result, a large stochastic GW background (SGWB) is generated throughout the process. We study the linear and non-linear dynamics of preheating with lattice simulations, following the production of GWs through all relevant stages. We find that large couplings lead to SGWBs with amplitudes today that can reach up to h2 �(0) GW <^> 5 & BULL; 10-9. These backgrounds are however peaked at high frequencies fp > 5 & BULL; 106 Hz, which makes them undetectable by current/planned GW observatories. As the amount of GWs produced is in any case remarkable, we discuss the prospects for probing the SGWB indirectly by using constraints on the effective number of relativistic species in the universe Neff.
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Mangano, G., Miele, G., Pastor, S., Pisanti, O., & Sarikas, S. (2012). Updated BBN bounds on the cosmological lepton asymmetry for non-zero theta(13). Phys. Lett. B, 708(1-2), 1–5.
Abstract: We discuss the bounds on the cosmological lepton number from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), in light of recent evidences for a large value of the neutrino mixing angle theta(13), sin(2) theta(13) greater than or similar to 0.01 at 2 sigma. The largest asymmetries for electron and mu, tau neutrinos compatible with He-4 and H-2 primordial yields are computed versus the neutrino mass hierarchy and mixing angles. The flavour oscillation dynamics is traced till the beginning of BBN and neutrino distributions after decoupling are numerically computed. The latter contains in general, non-thermal distortion due to the onset of flavour oscillations driven by solar squared mass difference in the temperature range where neutrino scatterings become inefficient to enforce thermodynamical equilibrium. Depending on the value of theta(13), this translates into a larger value for the effective number of neutrinos, N-eff. Upper bounds on this parameter are discussed for both neutrino mass hierarchies. Values for N-eff which are large enough to be detectable by the Planck experiment are found only for the (presently disfavoured) range sin(2) theta(13) <= 0.01.
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Forconi, M., Giare, W., Mena, O., Ruchika, Di Valentino, E., Melchiorri, A., et al. (2024). A double take on early and interacting dark energy from JWST. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 05(5), 097–37pp.
Abstract: The very first light captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed a population of galaxies at very high redshifts more massive than expected in the canonical Lambda CDM model of structure formation. Barring, among others, a systematic origin of the issue, in this paper, we test alternative cosmological perturbation histories. We argue that models with a larger matter component ohm m and/or a larger scalar spectral index n s can substantially improve the fit to JWST measurements. In this regard, phenomenological extensions related to the dark energy sector of the theory are appealing alternatives, with Early Dark Energy emerging as an excellent candidate to explain (at least in part) the unexpected JWST preference for larger stellar mass densities. Conversely, Interacting Dark Energy models, despite producing higher values of matter clustering parameters such as sigma 8 , are generally disfavored by JWST measurements. This is due to the energy -momentum flow from the dark matter to the dark energy sector, implying a smaller matter energy density. Upcoming observations may either strengthen the evidence or falsify some of these appealing phenomenological alternatives to the simplest Lambda CDM picture.
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PTOLEMY Collaboration(Betti, M. G. et al), Gariazzo, S., & Pastor, S. (2019). Neutrino physics with the PTOLEMY project: active neutrino properties and the light sterile case. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 07(7), 047–31pp.
Abstract: The PTOLEMY project aims to develop a scalable design for a Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) detector, the first of its kind and the only one conceived that can look directly at the image of the Universe encoded in neutrino background produced in the first second after the Big Bang. The scope of the work for the next three years is to complete the conceptual design of this detector and to validate with direct measurements that the non-neutrino backgrounds are below the expected cosmological signal. In this paper we discuss in details the theoretical aspects of the experiment and its physics goals. In particular, we mainly address three issues. First we discuss the sensitivity of PTOLEMY to the standard neutrino mass scale. We then study the perspectives of the experiment to detect the CNB via neutrino capture on tritium as a function of the neutrino mass scale and the energy resolution of the apparatus. Finally, we consider an extra sterile neutrino with mass in the eV range, coupled to the active states via oscillations, which has been advocated in view of neutrino oscillation anomalies. This extra state would contribute to the tritium decay spectrum, and its properties, mass and mixing angle, could be studied by analyzing the features in the beta decay electron spectrum.
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Barenboim, G., Blinov, N., & Stebbins, A. (2021). Smallest remnants of early matter domination. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 12(12), 026–50pp.
Abstract: The evolution of the universe prior to Big Bang Nucleosynthesis could have gone through a phase of early matter domination which enhanced the growth of small-scale dark matter structure. If this period was long enough, self-gravitating objects formed prior to reheating. We study the evolution of these dense early halos through reheating. At the end of early matter domination, the early halos undergo rapid expansion and eventually eject their matter. We find that this process washes out structure on scales much larger than naively expected from the size of the original halos. We compute the density profiles of the early halo remnants and use them to construct late-time power spectra that include these non-linear effects. We evolve the resulting power spectrum to estimate the properties of microhalos that would form after matter-radiation equality. Surprisingly, cosmologies with a short period of early matter domination lead to an earlier onset of microhalo formation compared to those with a long period. In either case, dark matter structure formation begins much earlier than in the standard cosmology, with most dark matter bound in microhalos in the late universe.
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