0000000000345012
AUTHOR
Gordan Krnjaic
The First Three Seconds: a Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the Early Universe
It is commonly assumed that the energy density of the Universe was dominated by radiation between reheating after inflation and the onset of matter domination 54,000 years later. While the abundance of light elements indicates that the Universe was radiation dominated during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), there is scant evidence that the Universe was radiation dominated prior to BBN. It is therefore possible that the cosmological history was more complicated, with deviations from the standard radiation domination during the earliest epochs. Indeed, several interesting proposals regarding various topics such as the generation of dark matter, matter-antimatter asymmetry, gravitational waves,…
Cosmology with a very light Lμ − Lτ gauge boson
In this paper, we explore in detail the cosmological implications of an abelian L − L gauge extension of the Standard Model featuring a light and weakly coupled Z′. Such a scenario is motivated by the longstanding ∼ 4σ discrepancy between the measured and predicted values of the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment, (g − 2) , as well as the tension between late and early time determinations of the Hubble constant. If sufficiently light, the Z′ population will decay to neutrinos, increasing the overall energy density of radiation and altering the expansion history of the early universe. We identify two distinct regions of parameter space in this model in which the Hubble tension can be significa…