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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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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