Relic Neutrinos, thermal axions and cosmology in early 2014

Understand

We present up to date cosmological bounds on the sum of active neutrino masses as well as on extended cosmological scenarios with additional thermal relics, as thermal axions or sterile neutrino species.

• Our analyses consider all the current available cosmological data in the beginning of year 2014, including the very recent and most precise Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) measurements from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey.
• In the minimal three active neutrino scenario, we find Sum m_nu < 0.22 eV at 95% CL from the combination of CMB, BAO and Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the Hubble constant.
• A non zero value for the sum of the three active neutrino masses of about 0.3 eV is significantly favoured at more than 3 standard deviations when adding the constraints on sigma_8 and Omega_m from the Planck Cluster catalog on galaxy number counts.