Abstract: The framed standard model (FSM), constructed to explain the empirical mass and mixing patterns (including CP phases) of quarks and leptons, in which it has done quite well, gives otherwise the same result as the standard model (SM) in almost all areas in particle physics where the SM has been successfully applied, except for a few specified deviations such as the W mass and the g-2 of muons, that is, just where experiment is showing departures from what SM predicts. It predicts further the existence of a hidden sector of particles some of which may function as dark matter. In this paper, we first note that the above results involve, surprisingly, the FSM undergoing a vacuum transition (VTR1) at a scale of around 17MeV, where the vacuum expectation values of the colour framons (framed vectors promoted into fields) which are all nonzero above that scale acquire some vanishing components below it. This implies that the metric pertaining to these vanishing components would vanish also. Important consequences should then ensue, but these occur mostly in the unknown hidden sector where empirical confirmation is hard at present to come by, but they give small reflections in the standard sector, some of which may have already been seen. However, one notes that if, going off at a tangent, one imagines colour to be embedded, Kaluza-Klein (KK) fashion, into a higher-dimensional space-time, then this VTR1 would cause 2 of the compactified dimensions to collapse. This might mean then that when the universe cooled to the corresponding temperature of 1011 K when it was about 10-3 s old, this VTR1 collapse would cause the three spatial dimensions of the universe to expand to compensate. The resultant expansion is estimated, using FSM parameters previously determined from particle physics, to be capable, when extrapolated backwards in time, of bringing the present universe back inside the then horizon, solving thus formally the horizon problem. Besides, VTR1 being a global phenomenon in the FSM, it would switch on and off automatically and simultaneously over all space, thus requiring seemingly no additional strategy for a graceful exit. However, this scenario has not been checked for consistency with other properties of the universe and is to be taken thus not as a candidate solution of the horizon problem but only as an observation from particle physics which might be of interest to cosmologists and experts in the early universe. For particle physicists also, it might serve as an indicator for how relevant this VTR1 can be, even if the KK assumption is not made.

Abstract: The ARCADE 2 collaboration has reported a significant excess in the isotropic radio background, whose homogeneity cannot be reconciled with clustered sources. This suggests a cosmological origin prior to structure formation. We investigate several potential mechanisms and show that injection of relativistic electrons through late decays of a metastable particle can give rise to the observed excess radio spectrum through synchrotron emission. However, constraints from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy, on injection of charged particles and on the primordial magnetic field, present a challenge. The simplest scenario is with a greater than or similar to 9 GeV particle decaying into e(+)e(-) at a redshift of z similar to 5, in a magnetic field of similar to 5 μG, which exceeds the CMB B-field constraints, unless the field was generated after decoupling. Decays into exotic millicharged particles can alleviate this tension, if they emit synchroton radiation in conjunction with a sufficiently large background magnetic field of a dark U(1)' gauge field.

Abstract: Cosmological observables show a dependence with the neutrino mass, which is partially degenerate with parameters of extended models of gravity. We study and explore this degeneracy in Horndeski generalized scalar-tensor theories of gravity. Using forecasted cosmic microwave background and galaxy power spectrum datasets, we find that a single parameter in the linear regime of the effective theory dominates the correlation with the total neutrino mass. For any given mass, a particular value of this parameter approximately cancels the power suppression due to the neutrino mass at a given redshift. The extent of the cancellation of this degeneracy depends on the cosmological large-scale structure data used at different redshifts. We constrain the parameters and functions of the effective gravity theory and determine the influence of gravity on the determination of the neutrino mass from present and future surveys.