We calculate finite-temperature corrections to the decay rate of a generic neutral (pseudo)scalar particle that decays into (pseudo)scalars or fermion-antifermion pairs. The ratio of the finite-temperature decay rate to the zero-temperature decay rate is presented. Thermal effects are largest in the limit where the decaying particle is nonrelativistic but with a mass well below the background temperature, but significant effects are possible even when we relax the former assumption. Thermal effects are reduced for the case of nonzero momentum of the decaying particle. We discuss cosmological scenarios under which significant finite-temperature corrections to the decay rate can be achieved.
We estimate the chirality of the cosmological medium due to parity violating decays of standard model particles, focusing on the example of tau leptons. The non-trivial chirality is however too small to make a significant contribution to the cosmological magnetic field via the chiral-magnetic effect.
A QCD axion with a time-dependent decay constant has been known to be able to accommodate high-scale inflation without producing topological defects or too large isocurvature perturbations on CMB scales. We point out that a dynamical decay constant also has the effect of enhancing the small-scale axion isocurvature perturbations. The enhanced axion perturbations can even exceed the periodicity of the axion potential, and thus lead to the formation of axionic domain walls. Unlike the well-studied axionic walls, the walls produced from the enhanced perturbations are not bounded by cosmic strings…
A massive particle decaying into neutrinos in the early Universe is known to be less constrained than if it was decaying into other standard model particles. However, even if the decay proceeds into neutrinos, the latter still inevitably emit secondary particles undergoing electromagnetic interactions that can be probed. We analyse in details how sensitive various cosmological probes are to such secondary particles, namely CMB anisotropies, CMB spectral distortions, and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. For relics whose lifetime is shorter than the age of the Universe, this leads to original and strin…
The quantum fluctuations of the Higgs field during inflation could be a source of primordial density perturbations through Higgs-dependent inflaton decay. By measuring primordial non-Gaussianities, this so-called Higgs-modulated reheating scenario provides us a unique chance to probe Higgs interactions at extremely high energy scale, which we call the Cosmological Higgs Collider (CHC). We realize CHC in a simple scenario where the inflaton decays into Higgs-portal scalars, taking account of the decay of the Higgs fluctuation amplitude after inflation. We also calculate the CHC signals of Stand…
The Bogoliubov transformation in cosmological particle production can be explained by the Stokes phenomena of the corresponding ordinary differential equation. The calculation becomes very simple as far as the solution is described by a special function. Otherwise, the calculation requires more tactics, where the Exact WKB (EWKB) may be a powerful tool. Using the EWKB, we discuss cosmological particle production focusing on the effect of more general interaction and classical scattering. The classical scattering appears when the corresponding scattering problem of the Schrödinger equation deve…
Cosmological particle production by a time-dependent scalar field is common in cosmology. We focus on the mechanism of asymmetry production when interaction explicitly violates symmetry and its motion is rapid enough to create particles by itself. Combining the exact WKB analysis and the Landau-Zener transition, we point out that perturbation before the non-perturbative analysis may drastically change the structure of the Stokes lines of the theory. The Exact WKB can play an important role in avoiding such discrepancies.
If a fraction $f_{\rm dcdm}$ of the Dark Matter decays into invisible and massless particles (so-called "dark radiation") with the decay rate (or inverse lifetime) $Γ_{\rm dcdm}$, such decay will leave distinctive imprints on cosmological observables. With a full consideration of the Boltzmann hierarchy, we calculate the decay-induced impacts not only on the CMB but also on the redshift distortion and the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, while providing detailed physical interpretations based on evaluating the evolution of gravitational potential. By using the current cosmological data with …
It has been suggested that late-universe dark matter decays can alleviate the tension between measurements of $H_0$ in the local universe and its value inferred from cosmic microwave background fluctuations. It has been suggested that decaying dark matter can potentially account for this discrepancy as it reshuffles the energy density between matter and radiation and as a result allows dark energy to become dominant at earlier times. In this work, we show that the low multipole amplitude of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy power spectrum severely constrains the feasibility of late-ti…
Cosmological Constraints on Long-Lived Particles Using Dimension-Six Effective Operators
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte（北里奥格兰德联邦大学）；International Institute of Physics, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte（北里奥格兰德联邦大学国际物理研究所）；Millennium Institute for Subatomic Physics at the High-Energy Frontier (SAPHIR) of ANID（智利国家研究与创新局高能前沿亚原子物理千年研究所（SAPHIR））；Universidad de La Serena（拉塞雷纳大学）；Universidade Federal de Pernambuco（伯南布哥联邦大学）
We generalize the action for point particle motion to a double field theory background. After deriving the general equations of motion for these particle geodesics, we specialize to the case of a cosmological background with vanishing antisymmetric tensor field and constant dilaton. We then show that the geodesics can be extended to infinity in both time directions once we define the appropriate physical clock. Following this prescription, we also show the existence of a singularity-free cosmological solution.
We study cosmological scenarios in which high-energy neutrinos are emitted from the decay of long-lived massive particles at the cosmic time later than a redshift of 10^6. The high-energy neutrino events recently observed by the IceCube experiment suggest a new source of high-energy cosmic-ray neutrinos; decay of a heavy particle can be one of the possibilities. We calculate the spectrum of the high-energy neutrinos emitted from the decay of long-lived particles, taking account of the neutrino scattering processes with background neutrinos. Then, we derive bounds on the scenario using the obse…
Very recently a novel implementation of type-II seesaw mechanism for neutrino mass has been proposed in SU(5) grand unified theory with a number of desirable new physical phenomena beyond the standard model.Introducing heavy right-haded neutrinos and extra fermion singlets, in this work we show how the type-I seeaw cancellation mechanism works in this SU(5) framework. Besides predicting verifiable LFV decays, we further show that the model predicts dominant double beta decay with normal hierarchy or inverted hierarchy of active light neutrino masses in concordance with cosmological bound. In a…
We study the decay of a Higgs-like scalar Yukawa coupled to massless fermions in post-inflationary cosmology, combining a non-perturbative method with an adiabatic expansion. The renormalized survival probability $\mathcal{P}_Φ(t)$ of a (quasi) particle ``born'' at time $t_b$ and decaying at rest in the comoving frame, $\mathcal{P}_Φ(t) = \Big[\frac{t}{t_b}\Big]^{-\frac{Y^2}{8π^2}}~ e^{ \frac{Y^2}{4π^2}\,\big(t/t_b\big)^{1/4} } \,e^{-Γ_0\,(t-t_b)}~ \mathcal{P}_Φ(t_b) $, with $Γ_0$ the decay rate at rest in Minkowski space-time. For an ultrarelativistic particle we find $\mathcal{P}_Φ(t) = e^{-…
Axion-like particles (ALPs) decaying into photons are known to affect a wide range of astrophysical and cosmological observables. In this study we focus on ALPs with masses in the keV-MeV range and lifetimes between $10^4$ and $10^{13}$ seconds, corresponding to decays between the end of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and the formation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Using the CosmoBit module of the global fitting framework GAMBIT, we combine state-of-the-art calculations of the irreducible ALP freeze-in abundance, primordial element abundances (including photodisintegration through ALP de…
If there exist higher-spin particles during inflation which are light compared to the Hubble rate, they may leave distinct statistical anisotropic imprints on the correlators involving scalar and graviton fluctuations. We characterise such signatures using the dS/CFT$_3$ correspondence and the operator product expansion techniques. In particular, we obtain generic results for the case of partially massless higher-spin states.
In the early sixties Leonard Parker discovered that the expansion of the universe can create particles out of the vacuum, opening a new and fruitfull field in physics. We give a historical review in the form of an interview that took place during the Conference ERE2014 (Valencia 1-5, September, 2014).
We investigate how sterile neutrinos with a range of masses influence cosmology in MeV-scale reheating temperature scenarios. By computing the production of sterile neutrinos through the combination of mixing and scattering in the early Universe, we find that light sterile neutrinos, with masses and mixings as inferred from short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, are consistent with big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation for the reheating temperature of ${\cal O}(1)$ MeV if the parent particle responsible for reheating decays into electromagneti…
We discuss the adiabatic basis dependence of particle number in time-dependent backgrounds. In particular, we focus on preheating after inflation, and show that, for the optimal basis, the time dependence of the produced particle number can be well approximated by a simple connection formula, which can be obtained by analysing Stokes phenomenon in given backgrounds. As we show explicitly, the simple connection formula can describe various parameter regions such as narrow and broad resonance regime in a unified manner.
Axion-like particles with masses in the keV-GeV range have a profound impact on the cosmological evolution of our Universe, in particular on the abundance of light elements produced during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. The resulting limits are complementary to searches in the laboratory and provide valuable additional information regarding the validity of a given point in parameter space. A potential drawback is that altering the cosmological history may potentially weaken or even fully invalidate these bounds. The main objective of this article is therefore to evaluate the robustness of cosmologi…
We derive constraints on dark matter (DM) annihilation cross section and decay lifetime from cross-correlation analyses of the data from Fermi-LAT and weak lensing surveys that cover a wide area of $\sim660$ squared degrees in total. We improve upon our previous analyses by using an updated extragalactic $γ$-ray background data reprocessed with the Fermi Pass 8 pipeline, and by using well-calibrated shape measurements of about twelve million galaxies in the Canada-France-Hawaii Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) and Red-Cluster-Sequence Lensing Survey (RCSLenS). We generate a large set of full-sky mock…
No Hiding in the Dark: Cosmological Bounds on Heavy Neutral Leptons with Dark Decay Channels
Washington University（华盛顿大学）；Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz（美因茨约翰内斯古腾堡大学）；Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院高能物理研究所）；Kaiping Neutrino Research Center（开平中微子研究中心）
Acoustic perturbations in an expanding hadronic fluid at temperatures below the chiral transition point represent massless pions propagating in curved spacetime geometry. In comoving coordinates the corresponding analog metric tensor describes a hyperbolic FRW spacetime. We study the analog cosmological particle creation of pions below the critical point of the chiral phase transition. We compare the cosmological creation spectrum with the spectrum of analog Hawking radiation at the analog trapping horizon.
Particle production by expanding in the future light cone scalar quantum field is studied by assuming that the initial state is associated with the quasiequilibrium statistical operator corresponding to fluid dynamics. We calculate particle production from a longitudinally boost-invariant expanding quantum field designed as a simple but reliable model for the central rapidity region of a relativistic collision. Exact diagonalization of the model is performed by introducing a notion of quasiparticles.
We discuss the relic abundance of asymmetric Dark Matter particles in modified cosmological scenarios where the Hubble rate is changed with respect to the standard cosmological scenario. The modified Hubble rate leaves its imprint on the relic abundance of asymmetric Dark Matter particles if the asymmetric Dark Matter particles freeze--out in this era. For generality we parameterize the modification of the Hubble rate and then calculate the relic abundance of asymmetric Dark Matter particles and anti--particles. We found the abundances for the Dark Matter particles and anti--particles are enha…
We discuss the impact of the cosmological measurements on the predictions of the Majorana mass of the neutrinos, the parameter probed by neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments. Using a minimal set of assumptions, we quantify the probabilities of discovering neutrinoless double-beta decay and introduce a new graphical representation that could be of interest for the community.
