Eleonora Di Valentino (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris) "New Constraints on Extensions of the Standard Cosmological Model"

Abstract:
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy measurements from the Planck mission have significantly improved previous constraints on the neutrino masses, as well as the bounds on extended models with massive sterile neutrino states or extra particles, as for example thermal axions. In this talk firstly I will show the recent constraints from cosmology for the thermal axion mass and the neutrino sector, by considering several combination of datasets and scenarios. In particular, I will show how the inclusion of additional low redshift priors is mandatory in order to sharpen the CMB neutrino bounds, and that we are close to test the neutrino mass hierarchy with existing cosmological probes. Secondly, I will discuss how these constraints can change by taking into account the possibility that the primordial power spectrum could assume a more general shape than the usual power law description. Finally, I will present cosmological constraints in a significantly extended scenario, varying up to 12 cosmological parameters simultaneously, by looking for a new concordance model that should solve at the same time all the current tensions between the Planck data and the new direct measurements of the Hubble constant by Riess et al. 2016 and the parameters from weak lensing surveys, such as CFHTLenS and KiDS-450.