2 December 2025
University of Chicago
US/Central timezone

The cosmology of neutrinophilic ULDM and its impact on BBN

2 Dec 2025, 15:00
30m
ERC 401 (University of Chicago)

ERC 401

University of Chicago

University of Chicago William Eckhardt Research Center 5640 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637 Room ERC 401

Speaker

Toni Bertólez-Martínez (University of Wisconsin Madison)

Description

The high densities in the early Universe provide a unique laboratory to constrain couplings between feebly interacting particles, such as dark matter and neutrinos. I will introduce a model where neutrinos get their mass from a small diagonal coupling to ultralight dark matter (ULDM), and how to consistently use cosmology, namely Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), to constrain it. In particular, I will emphasize the need for accounting for the neutrino backreaction in the ULDM evolution, which causes its energy density to scale as radiation when the neutrino interaction dominates the dynamics. Finally, I will discuss the effect of the coupled neutrino-ULDM fluid in BBN and how to use primordial element abundances to obtain competitive (and consistent) constraints.

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