Messengers from the Early Universe: Cosmic Neutrinos and Other Light Relics
Daniel Green, Mustafa A. Amin, Joel Meyers, Benjamin Wallisch, Kevork N. Abazajian, Muntazir Abidi, Peter Adshead, Zeeshan Ahmed, Behzad Ansarinejad, Robert Arm… 展开作者
Daniel Green, Mustafa A. Amin, Joel Meyers, Benjamin Wallisch, Kevork N. Abazajian, Muntazir Abidi, Peter Adshead, Zeeshan Ahmed, Behzad Ansarinejad, Robert Armstrong, Carlo Baccigalupi, Kevin Bandura, Darcy Barron, Nicholas Battaglia, Daniel Baumann, Keith Bechtol, Charles Bennett, Bradford Benson, Florian Beutler, Colin Bischoff, Lindsey Bleem, J. Richard Bond, Julian Borrill, Elizabeth Buckley-Geer, Cliff Burgess, John E. Carlstrom, Emanuele Castorina, Anthony Challinor, Xingang Chen, Asantha Cooray, William Coulton, Nathaniel Craig, Thomas Crawford, Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine, Guido D'Amico, Marcel Demarteau, Olivier Doré, Duan Yutong, Joanna Dunkley, Cora Dvorkin, John Ellison, Alexander van Engelen, Stephanie Escoffier, Tom Essinger-Hileman, Giulio Fabbian, Jeffrey Filippini, Raphael Flauger, Simon Foreman, George Fuller, Marcos A. G. Garcia, Juan García-Bellido, Martina Gerbino, Vera Gluscevic, Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, Krzysztof M. Górski, Daniel Grin, Evan Grohs, Jon E. Gudmundsson, Shaul Hanany, Will Handley, J. Colin Hill, Christopher M. Hirata, Renée Hložek, Gilbert Holder, Shunsaku Horiuchi, Dragan Huterer, Kenji Kadota, Marc Kamionkowski, Ryan E. Keeley, Rishi Khatri, Theodore Kisner, Jean-Paul Kneib, Lloyd Knox, Savvas M. Koushiappas, Ely D. Kovetz, Benjamin L'Huillier, Ofer Lahav, Massimiliano Lattanzi, Hayden Lee, Michele Liguori, Tongyan Lin, Marilena Loverde, Mathew Madhavacheril, Kiyoshi Masui, Jeff McMahon, Matthew McQuinn, P. Daniel Meerburg, Mehrdad Mirbabayi, Pavel Motloch, Suvodip Mukherjee, Julian B. Munõz, Johanna Nagy, Laura Newburgh, Michael D. Niemack, Andrei Nomerotski, Lyman Page, Francesco Piacentni, Elena Pierpaoli, Levon Pogosian, Clement Pryke, Giuseppe Puglisi, Radek Stompor, Marco Raveri, Christian L. Reichardt, Benjamin Rose, Graziano Rossi, John Ruhl, Emmanuel Schaan, Michael Schubnell, Katelin Schutz, Neelima Sehgal, Leonardo Senatore, Hee-Jong Seo, Blake D. Sherwin, Sara Simon, Anže Slosar, Suzanne Staggs, Albert Stebbins, Aritoki Suzuki, Eric R. Switzer, Peter Timbie, Matthieu Tristram, Mark Trodden, Yu-Dai Tsai, Caterina Umiltà, Eleonora Di Valentino, M. Vargas-Magaña, Abigail Vieregg, Scott Watson, Thomas Weiler, Nathan Whitehorn, W. L. K. Wu, Weishuang Xu, Zhilei Xu, Siavash Yasini, Matias Zaldarriaga, Gong-Bo Zhao, Ningfeng Zhu, Joe Zuntz
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5 pages + references; 1 figure; science white paper submitted to the Astro2020 decadal survey
The hot dense environment of the early universe is known to have produced large numbers of baryons, photons, and neutrinos. These extreme conditions may have also produced other long-lived species, including new light particles (such as axions or sterile neutrinos) or gravitational waves. The gravitational effects of any such light relics can be observed through their unique imprint in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the large-scale structure, and the primordial light element abundances, and are important in determining the initial conditions of the universe. We argue that future cosmological observations, in particular improved maps of the CMB on small angular scales, can be orders of magnitude more sensitive for probing the thermal history of the early universe than current experiments. These observations offer a unique and broad discovery space for new physics in the dark sector and beyond, even when its effects would not be visible in terrestrial experiments or in astrophysical environments. A detection of an excess light relic abundance would be a clear indication of new physics and would provide the first direct information about the universe between the times of reheating and neutrino decoupling one second later.
The observational evidence for the inflationary cosmology with baryosynthesis and dark matter/energy can be viewed as the messenger for new physics, which governed the Universe origin, evolution and structure. To specify the physics beyond the Standard model (BSM), underlying the modern cosmological paradigm additional model dependent messengers are proposed, involving multi-component and composite dark matter, meta-stable particles, primordial black holes and antimatter domains in baryon asymmetrical Universe.
The first measurement of the diffuse background spectrum at 0.8-1.7 $μ\rm{m}$ from the CIBER experiment has revealed a significant excess of the cosmic infrared background (CIB) radiation compared to the theoretically expected spectrum. We revisit the hypothesis that decays of axionlike particle (ALP) can explain this excess, extending previous analyses to the case of a warm relic population. We show that such a scenario is not excluded by anisotropy measurements nor by stellar cooling arguments. Moreover, we find that the increased extragalactic background light (EBL) does not contradict obse…
The Standard Cosmological Model predicts the existence of relic neutrinos, which are indirectly probed through the effective number of relativistic species in the early Universe. In addition, from neutrino flavour oscillations we know that at least two of the neutrino mass states have a non-zero mass. Since the expansion of the Universe has diluted the energy of relic neutrinos, those that are massive are also non relativistic today. This means that they can be trapped in strong gravitational potentials, such as the one of the Milky Way. We review the calculation of the local overdensity of re…
Many scenarios of physics beyond the standard model predict new light, weakly coupled degrees of freedom, populated in the early universe and remaining as cosmic relics today. Due to their high abundances, these relics can significantly affect the evolution of the universe. For instance, massless relics produce a shift $ΔN_{\rm eff}$ to the cosmic expectation of the effective number of active neutrinos. Massive relics, on the other hand, additionally become part of the cosmological dark matter in the later universe, though their light nature allows them to freely stream out of potential wells.…
In this letter, we consider a class of scenarios in which the dark matter is part of a heavy hidden sector that is thermally decoupled from the Standard Model in the early universe. The dark matter freezes-out by annihilating to a lighter, metastable state, whose subsequent abundance can naturally come to dominate the energy density of the universe. When this state decays, it reheats the visible sector and dilutes all relic abundances, thereby allowing the dark matter to be orders of magnitude heavier than the weak scale. For concreteness, we consider a simple realization with a Dirac fermion …
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…
One of the targets of future Cosmic Microwave Background and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation measurements is to improve the current accuracy in the neutrino sector and reach a much better sensitivity on extra dark radiation in the Early Universe. In this paper we study how these improvements can be translated into constraining power for well motivated extensions of the Standard Model of elementary particles that involve axions thermalized before the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase transition by scatterings with gluons. Assuming a fiducial $Λ$CDM cosmological model, we simulate future data for S…
Axions, if realized in nature, can be copiously produced in the early universe via thermal processes, contributing to the mass-energy density of thermal hot relics. In light of the most recent cosmological observations, we analyze two different thermal processes within a realistic mixed hot-dark-matter scenario which includes also massive neutrinos. Considering the axion-gluon thermalization channel we derive our most constraining bounds on the hot relic masses $m_a < 7.46$ eV and $\sum m_ν< 0.114$ eV both at 95 per cent CL; while studying the axion-pion scattering, without assuming any specif…
Many well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of new light species that may have been produced in the early universe. Prominent examples include axions, sterile neutrinos, gravitinos, dark photons, and more. The gravitational influence of light relics leaves imprints in the cosmic microwave background fluctuations, the large-scale structure of the universe and the primordial element abundances. In this paper, we detail the physics of cosmological light relics, and describe how measurements of their relic density and mass serve as probes of physics beyond the Standa…
We study the early-universe cosmology of a Kaluza-Klein (KK) tower of scalar fields in the presence of a mass-generating phase transition, focusing on the time-development of the total tower energy density (or relic abundance) as well as its distribution across the different KK modes. We find that both of these features are extremely sensitive to the details of the phase transition and can behave in a variety of ways significant for late-time cosmology. In particular, we find that the interplay between the temporal properties of the phase transition and the mixing it generates are responsible …
Illuminating the dark universe in the multi-messenger era
Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA（巴黎萨克雷大学，法国国家科学研究中心，法国原子能和替代能源委员会）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)（马克斯·普朗克引力物理研究所（爱因斯坦研究所））；Università degli Studi di Salerno（萨莱诺大学）；Institute for Basic Science (IBS)（韩国基础科学研究院）；Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（伊朗基本科学研究院）
We present a new mechanism to produce the dark photon ($γ'$) in the early universe with a help of the axion ($a$) using a recently proposed dark axion portal. The dark photon, a light gauge boson in the dark sector, can be a relic dark matter if its lifetime is long enough. The main process we consider is a variant of the Primakoff process $f a \to f γ'$ mediated by a photon, which is possible with the axion--photon--dark photon coupling. The axion is thermalized in the early universe because of the strong interaction and it can contribute to the non-thermal dark photon production through the …
We point out a unique mechanism to produce the relic abundance for glueball dark matter from a gauged $SU(N)_d$ hidden sector which is bridged to the standard model sector through heavy vectorlike quarks colored under gauge interactions from both sides. A necessary ingredient of our assumption is that the vectorlike quarks, produced either thermally or non-thermally, are abundant enough to dominate the universe for some time in the early universe. They later undergo dark color confinement and form unstable vectorlike-quarkonium states which annihilate decay and reheat the visible and dark sect…
The massive neutrinos of the Cosmic Neutrino Background (C$ν$B) are fundamental ingredients of the radiation-dominated early universe and are important non-relativistic probes of the large-scale structure formation in the late universe. The dominant source of anisotropies in the neutrino flux distribution on the sky are highly amplified integrals of metric perturbations encountered during the non-relativistic phase of the C$ν$B. This paper numerically compares the line-of-sight methods for computing C$ν$B anisotropies with the Einstein-Boltzmann hierarchy solutions in linear theory for a range…
We study the distortions of equilibrium spectra of relic neutrinos due to the interactions with electrons, positrons, and neutrinos in the early Universe. We solve the integro-differential kinetic equations for the neutrino density matrix, including three-flavor oscillations and finite temperature corrections from QED up to the next-to-leading order $\mathcal{O}(e^3)$ for the first time. In addition, the equivalent kinetic equations in the mass basis of neutrinos are directly solved, and we numerically evaluate the distortions of the neutrino spectra in the mass basis as well, which can be eas…
The early expansion history of the Universe is constrained by combining the most recent limits on the cosmic gravitons in the audio band and the claimed evidences of the nHz domain. The simplest scenario stipulates that between the end of inflation and the formation of light nuclei the evolution consists of a single phase expanding at a rate that is either faster or slower than the one of radiation. If there are instead multiple post-inflationary stages evolving at different rates, the spectral energy density always undershoots the signals potentially attributed to relic gravitons by the pulsa…
Cosmological measurements of the radiation density in the early universe can be used as a sensitive probe of physics beyond the standard model. Observations of primordial light element abundances have long been used to place non-trivial constraints on models of new physics and to inform our understanding of the thermal history to the first few minutes of our present phase of expansion. Precision measurements of the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization will drastically improve our measurement of the cosmic radiation density over the next decade.…
Both active and sterile sub-eV neutrinos can form the cosmic neutrino background in the early Universe. We consider the beta-decaying (e.g., $^3$H) and EC-decaying (e.g., $^{163}$Ho) nuclei as the promising targets to capture relic neutrinos in the laboratory. We calculate the capture rates of relic electron neutrinos and antineutrinos against the corresponding beta decay or electron capture (EC) decay backgrounds in the (3+$N_{\rm s}$) flavor mixing scheme, and discuss the future prospect in terms of the PTOLEMY project. We stress that such direct measurements of hot DM might not be hopeless …
We analyze observational signatures arising from an epoch in cosmology corresponding to the simple harmonic universe, which consists of positive curvature, a negative cosmological constant, and one or more exotic matter sources with $-1 < w = p/ρ\leq -1/3$, which may then evolve or tunnel into an inflating and hot Big Bang phase. Particular relics specific to this class of models include spatial curvature with $Ω_k < 0$, modifications to the dark energy sector due to the presence of residual exotic matter, and the possibility that the cosmological constant may ultimately be negative. We review…
INSPIRE: INvestigating Stellar Population In RElics V. A catalogue of ultra-compact massive galaxies outside the local Universe and their degree of relicness
Biswas et al. found that the thermal relic density of a dark matter particle freezing out while the universe's energy density is dominated by a non-standard extra component $ϕ$, whose energy density redshifts faster than radiation, can be greatly suppressed. Here we show that this result, which contradicts extensive previous literature, is incorrect: the mistake lies with the assumption that the (decoupled) extra component $ϕ$ contributes to the entropic degrees of freedom relevant for dark matter freeze out. If this were the case, a completely different approach would be needed to calculate t…
CORN -- Chronometers of Relic Nature I: The first estimate of the expansion rate of the Universe using compact relic galaxies
Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）；European Southern Observatory（欧洲南方天文台）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Open University（开放大学）；SISSA（国际高等研究学院）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；National Centre for Nuclear Research（国家核研究中心）
Thermal freeze-out is a prominent example of dark matter (DM) production mechanism in the early Universe that can yield the correct relic density of stable weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). At the other end of the mass scale, many popular extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of ultra-light scalar fields. These can be coupled to matter, preferentially in a universal and shift-symmetry-preserving way. We study the impact of such conformal and disformal couplings on the relic density of WIMPs, without introducing modifications to the thermal history of the Universe. …
One of the primary targets of current and future cosmological observations are light thermal relics of the hot big bang. Within the Standard Model of particle physics, an important thermal relic are cosmic neutrinos, while interesting extensions predict new light particles which are even more weakly coupled to ordinary matter. These elusive particles may nonetheless be produced efficiently in the early universe and their gravitational influence could be detectable in cosmological observables. In this thesis, we describe how measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-sc…
In a fundamental formulation of the quantum mechanics of a closed system such as the universe as a whole, three forms of information are needed to make predictions for the probabilities of alternative time histories of the closed system . These are the action functional of the elementary particles, the quantum istate of the universe, and the description of our specific history. We discuss the origin of the "quasiclassical realm" of familiar experience and Hamiltonian quantum mechanics with its preferred time in such a formulation of quantum cosmology. It is argued that these features of the un…
The discovery by the IceCube experiment of a high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux with energies of the order of PeV, has opened new scenarios in astroparticles physics. A possibility to explain this phenomenon is to consider the minimal models of Dark Matter (DM) decay, the 4-dimensional operator $\sim y_{αχ}\overline{L_{L_α}}\, H\, χ$, which is also able to generate the correct abundance of DM in the Universe. Assuming that the cosmological background evolves according to the standard cosmological model, it follows that the rate of DM decay $Γ_χ\sim |y_{αχ}|^2$ needed to get the correct DM…
Relic gravitational waves (RGWs) generated in the early Universe form a stochastic GW background, which can be directly probed by measuring the timing residuals of millisecond pulsars. In this paper, we investigate the constraints on the RGWs and on the inflationary parameters by the observations of current and potential future pulsar timing arrays. In particular, we focus on effects of various cosmic phase transitions (e.g. $e^{+}e^{-}$ annihilation, QCD transition and SUSY breaking) and relativistic free-streaming gases (neutrinos and dark fluids) in the general scenario of the early Univers…
