We present an up-to-date review of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). We discuss the main improvements which have been achieved in the past two decades on the overall theoretical framework, summarize the impact of new experimental results on nuclear reaction rates, and critically re-examine the astrophysical determinations of light nuclei abundances. We report then on how BBN can be used as a powerful test of new physics, constraining a wide range of ideas and theoretical models of fundamental interactions beyond the standard model of strong and electroweak forces and Einstein's general relativity.

The injection of secondary particles produced by dark matter (DM) annihilation around redshift similar to 1000 would inevitably affect the process of recombination, leaving an imprint on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and polarization. We show that the most recent CMB measurements provided by the WMAP satellite mission place interesting constraints on DM self-annihilation rates, especially for models that exhibit a large Sommerfeld enhancement of the annihilation cross section, as recently proposed to fit the PAMELA and ATIC results. Furthermore, we argue that upcoming CMB experiments such as Planck, will improve the constraints by at least 1 order of magnitude, thus providing a sensitive probe of the properties of DM particles