Dark Radiation and Inflationary Freedom [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.05980


A relaxed primordial power spectrum (PPS) of scalar perturbations arising from inflation can impact the dark radiation constraints obtained from Cosmic Microwave Background and other cosmological measurements. If inflation produces a non-standard PPS for the initial fluctuations, a fully thermalized light sterile neutrino can be favoured by CMB observations, instead of being strongly disfavoured. In the case of a thermal axion, the constraints on the axion mass are relaxed when the PPS is different from the standard power law.

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Gariazzo
Wed, 21 Oct 15
36/66

Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures; to appear in the Proceedings of the TAUP 2015 conference