ICCUB Seminar. Elena Giusarma: “Testing neutrino physics with cosmological observables”

One of the great puzzles related to the LambdaCDM model is the nature of the dark matter (DM) component. In standard cosmology, hot, thermal relics are identified with the three light, active neutrinos which are sub-eV elementary particles which, apart from gravity, only interact via weak interactions. From neutrino oscillation experiments we know that neutrinos have masses but they are not sensitive to the absolute neutrino mass scale.

Cosmology provides an independent tool to tackle the absolute scale of neutrino and to study its properties. In this talk I will illustrate the implications of neutrino properties on cosmological observables, in particular on the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and on Large Scale Structure, and I will review the present constraints on neutrino masses also describing the sensitivities of cosmological data on neutrino mass splitting.