Cosmological Implications of some Nonstandard Particle Physics Models

2012

The standard cosmological model has been very successful in describing the evolution of the Universe from the first seconds until today. However, some challenges still remain concerning the nature of some of its components as well as observationally probing some of the periods of its expansion. In this thesis we discuss what are probably the three least known components of the Universe: neutrinos, dark matter, and dark energy. In particular, concerning the neutrino sector, we place limits on the relic neutrino asymmetries using some of the latest cosmological data, taking into account the effect of flavor oscillations. We find that the present bounds are still dominated by the limits coming…