We devise a new user-friendly tool interfaced with the Boltzmann code CLASS to deal with any kind of exotic electromagnetic energy injection in the universe and its impact on anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background. It makes use of the results from standard electromagnetic cascade calculations develop in the context of WIMP annihilation, generalized to incorporate any injection history. We first validate it on a specific WIMP scenario, the Higgs Portal model, confirming that the standard effective on-the-spot treatment is accurate enough. We then analyze the more involved example of evaporating Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) with masses in the range [3 × 10 13 , 5 × 10 16 ]g, for which the standard approximations break down. We derive robust CMB bounds on the relic density of evaporating PBHs, ruling out the possibility for PBHs with a monochromatic distribution of masses in the range [3 × 10 13 , 2.5 × 10 16 ]g to represent all of the Dark Matter in our Universe. Remarkably, we confirm with an accurate study that the CMB bounds are several orders of magnitude stronger than those from the galactic gamma-ray background in the range [3×10 13 , 3×10 14 ]g. A future CMB experiment like CORE+, or an experiment attempting at measuring the 21 cm signal from the Dark Ages could greatly improve the sensitivity to these models.

We study the cosmological evolution and phenomenological properties of scalar bosons in the keV to MeV range that have a tiny mixing with the Standard Model Higgs boson. The mixing determines both the abundance of light scalars produced via the freezein mechanism and their lifetime. Intriguingly, the parameters required for such scalars to account for all of the dark matter in the present Universe generically predict lifetimes comparable to the sensitivity of present and future indirect detection experiments. In order to accurately determine the relic abundance of light scalars, we calculate freeze-in yields including effects from finite temperatures and quantum statistics and develop a new approach for solving the Boltzmann equation for number-changing processes in the dark sector. We find that light scalars can potentially explain the anomalous x-ray emission at 3.5 keV, while evading constraints from structure formation and predicting potentially observable self-interaction cross sections.

We introduce CosmoBit, a module within the open-source GAMBIT software framework for exploring connections between cosmology and particle physics with joint global fits. CosmoBit provides a flexible framework for studying various scenarios beyond ΛCDM, such as models of inflation, modifications of the effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom, exotic energy injection from annihilating or decaying dark matter, and variations of the properties of elementary particles such as neutrino masses and the lifetime of the neutron. Many observables and likelihoods in CosmoBit are computed via interfaces to AlterBBN, CLASS, DarkAges, MontePython, MultiModeCode, and plc. This makes it possible to apply a wide range of constraints from large-scale structure, Type Ia supernovae, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background. Parameter scans can be performed using the many different statistical sampling algorithms available within the GAMBIT framework, and results can be combined with calculations from other GAMBIT modules focused on particle physics and dark matter. We include extensive validation plots and a first application to scenarios with non-standard relativistic degrees of freedom and neutrino temperature, showing that the corresponding constraint on the sum of neutrino masses is much weaker than in the standard scenario.

We determine the upper limit on the mass of the lightest neutrino from the most robust recent cosmological and terrestrial data. Marginalising over possible effective relativistic degrees of freedom at early times (N eff ) and assuming normal mass ordering, the mass of the lightest neutrino is less than 0.037 eV at 95% confidence; with inverted ordering, the bound is 0.042 eV. This improves nearly 60% on other recent limits, bounding the mass of the lightest neutrino to be barely larger than the largest mass splitting. We show the impacts of realistic mass models, and different sources of N eff .

We assess the status of a wide class of WIMP dark matter (DM) models in light of the latest experimental results using the global fitting framework . We perform a global analysis of effective field theory (EFT) operators describing the interactions between a gauge-singlet Dirac fermion and the Standard Model quarks, the gluons and the photon. In this bottom-up approach, we simultaneously vary the coefficients of 14 such operators up to dimension 7, along with the DM mass, the scale of new physics and several nuisance parameters. Our likelihood functions include the latest data from Planck, direct and indirect detection experiments, and the LHC. For DM masses below 100 GeV, we find that it is impossible to satisfy all constraints simultaneously while maintaining EFT validity at LHC energies. For new physics scales around 1 TeV, our results are influenced by several small excesses in the LHC data and depend on the prescription that we adopt to ensure EFT validity. Furthermore, we find large regions of viable parameter space where the EFT is valid and the relic density can be reproduced, implying that WIMPs can still account for the DM of the universe while being consistent with the latest data.