Abstract: The hypermagnetic helicity density at the electroweak phase transition (EWPT) exceeds many orders of magnitude the galactic magnetic helicity density. Together with previous magnetic helicity evolution calculations after the EWPT and hypermagnetic helicity conversion to the magnetic one at the EWPT, the present calculation completes the description of the evolution of this important topological feature of cosmological magnetic fields. It suggests that if the magnetic field seeding the galactic dynamo has a primordial origin, it should be substantially helical. This should be taken into account in scenarios of galactic magnetic field evolution with a cosmological seed.

Abstract: Asymmetric Dark Matter (ADM) models invoke a particle-antiparticle asymmetry, similar to the one observed in the Baryon sector, to account for the Dark Matter (DM) abundance. Both asymmetries are usually generated by the same mechanism and generally related, thus predicting DM masses around 5 GeV in order to obtain the correct density. The main challenge for successful models is to ensure efficient annihilation of the thermally produced symmetric component of such a light DM candidate without violating constraints from collider or direct searches. A common way to overcome this involves a light mediator, into which DM can efficiently annihilate and which subsequently decays into Standard Model particles. Here we explore the scenario where the light mediator decays instead into lighter degrees of freedom in the dark sector that act as radiation in the early Universe. While this assumption makes indirect DM searches challenging, it leads to signals of extra radiation at BBN and CMB. Under certain conditions, precise measurements of the number of relativistic species, such as those expected from the Planck satellite, can provide information on the structure of the dark sector. We also discuss the constraints of the interactions between DM and Dark Radiation from their imprint in the matter power spectrum.

Abstract: We present neutrino mass bounds using 900,000 luminous galaxies with photometric redshifts measured from Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Data Release 8. The galaxies have photometric redshifts between z = 0.45 and z = 0.65 and cover 10,000 deg(2), thus probing a volume of 3 h(-3) Gpc(3) and enabling tight constraints to be derived on the amount of dark matter in the form of massive neutrinos. A new bound on the sum of neutrino masses Sigma m nu < 0.27 eV, at the 95% confidence level (CL), is obtained after combining our sample of galaxies, which we call “CMASS,” with Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) seven-year cosmic microwave background data and the most recent measurement of the Hubble parameter from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This constraint is obtained with a conservative multipole range of 30 < l < 200 in order to minimize nonlinearities, and a free bias parameter in each of the four redshift bins. We study the impact of assuming this linear galaxy bias model using mock catalogs and find that this model causes a small (similar to 1 sigma-1.5 sigma) bias in Omega(DM)h(2). For this reason, we also quote neutrino bounds based on a conservative galaxy bias model containing additional, shot-noise-like free parameters. In this conservative case, the bounds are significantly weakened, e. g., Sigma m(nu) < 0.38 eV (95% CL) for WMAP+HST+CMASS (l(max) = 200). We also study the dependence of the neutrino bound on the multipole range (l(max) = 150 versus l(max) = 200) and on which combination of data sets is included as a prior. The addition of supernova and/or baryon acoustic oscillation data does not significantly improve the neutrino mass bound once the HST prior is included. A companion paper describes the construction of the angular power spectra in detail and derives constraints on a general cosmological model, including the dark energy equation of state w and the spatial curvature Omega(K), while a second companion paper presents a measurement of the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations from the same data set. All three works are based on the catalog by Ross et al.