Dark Radiation and Inflationary Freedom
Abstract
A relaxed primordial power spectrum (PPS) of scalar perturbations arising from inflation can impact the dark radiation constraints obtained from Cosmic Microwave Background and other cosmological measurements. If inflation produces a non-standard PPS for the initial fluctuations, a fully thermalized light sterile neutrino can be favoured by CMB observations, instead of being strongly disfavoured. In the case of a thermal axion, the constraints on the axion mass are relaxed when the PPS is different from the standard power law.
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