arXiv subjects

Priyank Parashari

Publications and source records attributed to Priyank Parashari.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Transient Early Dark Energy-Like Dynamics as a Mechanism for Enhanced Early Structure Formation in the JWST Era

The discovery of massive galaxies at redshifts $z\gtrsim10$ by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has renewed interest in cosmological mechanisms capable of enhancing early structure formation while preserving the successful large-scale predictions of the standard $\Lambda$CDM model. We investigate a phenomenological scenario in which an exotic dark matter species can undergo a transient early dark energy-like phase during the radiation-dominated era ($10^{-7}\lesssim a\lesssim10^{-5}$) before reverting to pressureless cold dark matter. We utilize the generalized dark matter framework to model this species, which is restricted to a sub-percent fraction of the total dark matter component by CMB, BAO and Type Ia supernova data. Its background and perturbation dynamics are characterized by a time-dependent equation of state, $w(a)$, and a time- as well as scale-dependent sound speed, $c_s^2(a,k)$. The temporary negative equation of state, combined with our phenomenological pressure-response prescription, induces a finite interval of negative effective sound speed squared. This triggers an instability-driven growth of density perturbations over a limited range of comoving scales, thereby enhancing the formation of early dark matter halos. We find that the enhanced halo abundance can substantially reduce the star-formation efficiencies required to reproduce the observed abundance of JWST galaxies relative to the standard $\Lambda$CDM scenario, especially at higher redshifts. Our results demonstrate that transient early dark energy-like dynamics in a subdominant dark matter component provide a viable mechanism for enhancing early structure formation and offer a new framework for interpreting the abundance of high-redshift galaxies observed by JWST and future surveys.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2026

Ly{\alpha} forest bounds on sterile neutrino production via neutrino self-interactions

Sterile neutrinos in the keV mass range have long been considered a well-motivated dark matter (DM) candidate. In this work, we explore a sterile neutrino production mechanism through active neutrino self-interactions in the early universe, assuming that they constitute the full DM abundance. We implement a self-consistent treatment of the sterile-neutrino free streaming and the active-neutrino self-interactions on structure formation, which yield a unique scale-dependent modification to the linear matter power spectrum. We then set bounds on this scenario using a combination of the cosmic microwave background and Ly$\alpha$ forest constraints. Specifically, we utilize the two recent likelihoods derived from eBOSS data: (i) an effective field theory (EFT) based full-shape likelihood and (ii) a compressed likelihood obtained from the PRIYA-simulation emulator. We produce some of the most stringent observational constraints to date on sterile neutrino DM, comparable to the bounds from the most stringent laboratory constraints.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

Forecasting 21-cm power spectrum sensitivity to dark Matter-baryon scattering

We explore the potential of upcoming 21-cm interferometric observations to probe interacting dark matter (IDM). We focus on scenarios where the dark matter-baryon scattering cross-section scales as $\sigma(v) =\sigma_{0} v^n$, with $\sigma_{0}$ being the normalization constant, $v$ the relative velocity between dark matter and baryons, and $n$ characterizing the velocity dependence. Specifically, we emphasize two cases: Coulomb-like interaction ($n = -4$) and velocity-independent interaction ($n = 0$). Using detailed simulations of the 21-cm power spectrum and the Fisher matrix formalism, we forecast the sensitivity of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA), which targets the frequency range 50-225 MHz, to both IDM and astrophysical parameters. We marginalize over key astrophysical uncertainties, including star formation efficiency, ionizing photon escape fraction, and X-ray luminosity. Our results demonstrate that 21-cm power spectrum measurements can significantly improve sensitivity to IDM cross-section, with at least a factor of five improvement over global signal forecasts for the $n=0$ case, and more than an order of magnitude enhancement for the $n=-4$ scenario. These forecasts also significantly improve upon the existing bounds from cosmic microwave background and Milky Way satellite abundance observations. Our analysis also shows that the IDM cross-section exhibits no correlation with the parameters associated with star formation efficiency and ionizing photon escape fraction of Population-II stars. However, we find that the Coulomb-like cross-section is positively correlated with X-ray luminosity. Our results highlight the critical role of accounting for astrophysical uncertainties in obtaining robust inferences of dark matter-baryon interactions from future 21-cm power spectrum observations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

Sensitivity of the Global 21-cm Signal to Dark Matter-Baryon Scattering

With current and upcoming experiments on the horizon, the global 21-cm signal can open up new avenues for probing dark matter (DM) physics at redshifts that are otherwise inaccessible to other observables. This work investigates the effects of elastic scattering between DM and baryons on the global 21-cm signal in two distinct interacting DM (IDM) models: Coulomb-like and velocity-independent interactions. Our analysis incorporates key astrophysical parameters essential for accurately modeling the global signal, including star formation efficiency, escape fraction of ionizing photons, normalization of the X-ray luminosity, the number of Lyman-Werner photons emitted per stellar baryon, the minimum virial temperature of star-forming halos, as well as the IDM particle mass and cross section. We perform a Fisher analysis to forecast the sensitivity of four global 21-cm signal experimental scenarios as probes of DM-baryon scattering. We find that global signal experiments, even at the sensitivity of the current facilities such as EDGES and SARAS3, could improve existing cosmological and astrophysical constraints on DM-baryon scattering. Our results also highlight the degeneracies among the DM-baryon interaction cross section and astrophysical quantities. In particular, degeneracies between the IDM cross section and two astrophysical parameters, the minimum virial temperature, and Lyman-Werner photon production, can significantly impact the DM interaction inference. Conversely, the velocity-independent cross section is found to be insensitive to uncertainties in the X-ray luminosity. These findings underscore the necessity of accurately characterizing the uncertainties in astrophysical parameters to leverage the full potential of the 21-cm global signal experiments in probing IDM physics.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Probing the cosmic sterile-neutrino background with IceCube

In this paper, we take a close look at the interaction between the TeV--PeV energy astrophysical neutrinos and a hypothetical cosmic sterile-neutrino background. These interactions yield absorption features, also called ``dips", in the astrophysical neutrino spectrum, which are studied using the deposited energy distribution of high-energy starting events (HESE) in the IceCube detector. We improve upon the previous analysis by including the effects of regeneration and a realistic source distribution on the propagation of astrophysical neutrinos. We use the latest 7.5-year HESE dataset and include the observation of Glashow resonance in our analysis. We evaluate the impact of these dips on the inferred spectral index and overall normalization of the astrophysical neutrinos. We find a mild preference for dips in the 300--800 TeV range, and the best-fit parameters for the mass of sterile-neutrino and the mediator are 0.5 eV and 23 MeV, respectively. We find that the inclusion of these absorption features lowers the spectral index of astrophysical neutrinos to $2.60^{+0.19}_{-0.16}$. We show qualitatively that the lower spectral index from HESE sample can reduce the disagreement with the Northern Tracks sample. We also forecast the event spectrum for IceCube-Gen2 for the two different fits.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

Hunting Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter in Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest

A very pressing question in contemporary physics is the identity of Dark Matter (DM). Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) are one of the most well-motivated DM candidates. Light PBHs have been constrained by either the non-detection of their Hawking radiation itself, or by the non-observation of any measurable effects of this radiation on astrophysical and cosmological observables. We constrain the PBH contribution to the DM density by non-detection of their Hawking radiation's effect on the intergalactic medium (IGM) temperature evolution. We use the latest deductions of IGM temperature from Lyman-$\alpha$ forest observations. We put constraints on the fraction of DM as PBHs with masses $5 \times 10^{15}$ g - $10^{17}$ g, separately for spinning and non-spinning BHs. We derive constraints by dealing with the heating effects of the astrophysical reionization sources on the IGM in two ways. In one way, we completely neglect this heating due to astrophysical sources, thus giving us weaker constraints, but completely robust to the reionization history of the universe. In the second way, we utilise some modelling of the ionization and temperature history, and use it to derive more stringent constraints. We find that for non-spinning PBHs of mass $10^{16}$ g, the current measurements can constrain the PBH-density to be $\lesssim$ 0.1\% of the total DM. We find that these constraints are competitive, and hence provide a new observable to probe the nature of PBH DM. The systematics affecting Lyman-$\alpha$ forest measurements are different from other constraining observations, and thus this is a complementary probe.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

First Search for High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Galaxy Mergers

The exact sources of high-energy neutrinos detected by the IceCube neutrino observatory still remain a mystery. For the first time, this work explores the hypothesis that galaxy mergers may serve as sources for these high-energy neutrinos. Galaxy mergers can host very high-energy hadronic and photohadronic processes, which may produce very high-energy neutrinos. We perform an unbinned maximum-likelihood-ratio analysis utilizing the galaxy merger data from six catalogs and 10 years of public IceCube muon-track data to quantify any correlation between these mergers and neutrino events. First, we perform the single source search analysis, which reveals that none of the considered galaxy mergers exhibit a statistically significant correlation with high-energy neutrino events detected by IceCube. Furthermore, we conduct a stacking analysis with three different weighting schemes to understand if these galaxy mergers can contribute significantly to the diffuse flux of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos detected by IceCube. We find that upper limits (at $95\%$ CL) of the all flavor high-energy neutrino flux, associated with galaxy mergers considered in this study, at $100$ TeV with spectral index $\Gamma=-2$ are $1.11\times 10^{-18}$, $3.69 \times 10^{-19}$ and $1.02 \times 10^{-18}$ $\rm GeV^{-1}\,cm^{-2}\,s^{-1}\,sr^{-1}$ for the three weighting schemes. This work shows that these selected galaxy mergers do not contribute significantly to the IceCube detected high energy neutrino flux. We hope that in the near future with more data, the search for neutrinos from galaxy mergers can either discover their neutrino production or impose more stringent constraints on the production mechanism of high-energy neutrinos within galaxy mergers.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2023

Primordial power spectrum in light of JWST observations of high redshift galaxies

Early data releases of JWST have revealed several high redshift massive galaxy candidates by photometry, and some of them have been confirmed spectroscopically. We study their implications on the primordial power spectrum. In the first part, we use the CEERS photometric survey data, along with respective spectroscopic updates, to compute the cumulative comoving stellar mass density. We find that a very high star formation efficiency (unlikely in various theoretical scenarios) is required to explain these observations within Lambda cold dark matter ($\Lambda$CDM) cosmology. We show that the tension can be eased if the primordial power spectrum has a blue tilt. In the second part, we study spectroscopically confirmed galaxies reported in the JADES survey to investigate their implications on a red-tilted primordial power spectrum. We estimate the star formation efficiency from an earlier observation at similar redshift by {\it Spitzer}, and find that the star formation efficiency is an order of magnitude smaller than required to explain the CEERS photometric observations mentioned earlier. Using the estimated star formation efficiency, we find the strongest constraints on the red tilt of the power spectrum over some scales. Our study shows that JWST will be an excellent probe of the power spectrum and can lead to novel discoveries.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2022

Bounds on ultralight bosons from the Event Horizon Telescope observation of Sgr A$^*$

Recent observation of Sagittarius A$^*$ (Sgr A$^*$) by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has uncovered various unanswered questions in black hole (BH) physics. Besides, it may also probe various beyond the Standard Model (BSM) scenarios. One of the most profound possibilities is the search for ultralight bosons (ULBs) using BH superradiance (SR). EHT observations imply that Sgr A$^*$ has a non-zero spin. Using this observation, we derive bounds on the mass of ULBs with purely gravitational interactions. Considering self-interacting ultralight axions, we constrain new regions in the parameter space of decay constant, for a certain spin of Sgr A$^*$. Future observations of various spinning BHs can improve the present constraints on ULBs.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2021

Evidence of dark energy in different cosmological observations

The idea of a negative-pressure dark energy component in the Universe which causes an accelerated expansion in the late Universe has deep implications in models of field theory and general relativity. In this article, we survey the evidence for dark energy from cosmological observations which started from the compilation of distance-luminosity plots of Type Ia supernovae. This turned out to be consistent with the dark energy inferred from the CMB observations and large scale surveys and gave rise to the concordance $Λ$CDM model of cosmology. In this article, we discuss the observational evidence for dark energy from Type Ia supernovae, CMB, galaxy surveys, observations of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect from clusters, and lensing by clusters. We also discuss the observational discrepancy in the values of $H_0$ and $σ_8$ between CMB and large scale structures and discuss if varying dark energy models are able to resolve these tensions between different observations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2021

Implications of the NANOGrav result on primordial gravitational waves in nonstandard cosmologies

Recently, the NANOGrav collaboration has reported evidence for a common-spectrum stochastic process, which might be interpreted as the first ever detection of stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background. We discuss the possibility of the signal arising from the first and second-order GWs in nonstandard cosmological history. We show that the NANOGrav observation can be explained by the first order GWs in the nonstandard thermal history with an early matter-dominated era, whereas the parameter space required to explain the NANOGrav observation in the standard cosmology or in the nonstandard epoch of kination domination is ruled out by the BBN and CMB observations. For the second-order GWs arising from the large primordial scalar fluctuations, we study the standard radiation domination and two specific nonstandard cases with a few forms of the primordial power spectrum $P_ζ(k)$ to achieve abundant primordial black hole (PBH) production. We find that the NANOGrav observation can be explained with standard radiation domination for all of these $P_ζ(k)$. Furthermore, a dustlike epoch leads to abundant PBH formation for a lower amplitude of $P_ζ(k)$ than the radiation dominated case and complies with the NANOGrav observation only for a few of the all $P_ζ(k)$ forms considered here, where the peak wavenumber is larger than the wavenumber range probed by the NANOGrav. In this nonstandard epoch, for a broad power spectrum, PBHs are produced in a wide mass range in the planetary mass regime. A nonstandard epoch of kination domination cannot produce enough PBH for any of the $P_ζ(k)$ if the NANOGrav result is to be satisfied.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Flavour specific neutrino self-interaction: $H_0$ tension and IceCube

Self-interaction in the active neutrinos is studied in the literature to alleviate the $H_0$ tension. Similar self-interaction can also explain the observed dips in the flux of the neutrinos coming from the distant astro-physical sources in IceCube detectors. In contrast to the flavour universal neutrino interaction considered for solving the $H_0$ tension, which is ruled out from particle physics experiments, we consider flavour specific neutrino interactions. We show that the values of self-interaction coupling constant and mediator mass required for explaining the IceCube dips are inconsistent with the strong neutrino self-interactions preferred by the combination of BAO, HST and Planck data. However, the required amount of self-interaction between tau neutrinos ($\nu_\tau$) in inverted hierarchy for explaining IceCube dips is consistent with the moderate self-interaction region of cosmological bounds at 1-$\sigma$ level. For the case of other interactions and hierarchies, the IceCube preferred amount of self-interaction is consistent with moderate self-interaction region of cosmological bounds at 2-$\sigma$ level only.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Primordial black holes and gravitational waves in nonstandard cosmologies

For primordial black holes (PBHs) to form a considerable fraction of cold dark matter, the required amplitude of primordial scalar perturbations is quite large ($P_ζ(k) \sim 10^{-2}$) if PBH is formed in radiation epoch. In alternate cosmological histories, where additional epoch of arbitrary equation of state precede radiation epoch, the dynamics of PBH formation and relevant mass ranges can be different leading to lower requirement of primordial power at smaller scales of inflation. Moreover, this alternate history can modify the predictions for the gravitational wave (GW) spectrum, which can be probed by upcoming GW observations. In this paper, we show that an early kination epoch can lead to per cent level abundance ofPBH for a lower amplitude of $P_ζ(k)$ compared to PBH formation in a standard radiation epoch. Moreover, we calculate the effect of early kination epoch on the GW spectrum for first and second orders in perturbation theory which show enhancement in the amplitude of the GW spectrum in a kination epoch with respect to that in a standard radiation epoch.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Inflation models in the light of self-interacting sterile neutrinos

Short baseline neutrino experiments, like LSND and MiniBooNE experiments, pointed towards the existence of eV mass scale sterile neutrinos. To reconcile sterile neutrinos with cosmology self interaction between sterile neutrinos has been studied. We analysed Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) data with self-interacting sterile neutrino (SI$ν$) and study their impact on inflation models. The fit to the CMB data in SI$ν$ model is as good as the fit to $Λ$CDM model. We find that the spectral index ($n_s$) values shift to $0.9361\pm 0.0055$ in SI$ν$ model. This has significant impact on the validity of different inflation models. For example the Starobinsky and quartic hilltop model, which were allowed within $Λ$CDM cosmology, are ruled out. On the other hand some models like natural and Coleman-Weinberg inflation are now favoured. Therefore, the existence of self interacting sterile neutrinos with eV order of mass will play an important role in the selection of correct inflation model.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Testing Dark energy models in the light of $σ_8$ tension

It has been pointed out that there exists a tension in $σ_8-Ω_m$ measurement between CMB and LSS observation. In this paper we show that $σ_8-Ω_m$ observations can be used to test the dark energy theories. We study two models, (1) Hu-Sawicki(HS) Model of $f(R)$ gravity and (2) Chavallier-Polarski-Linder(CPL) parametrization of dynamical dark energy (DDE), both of which satisfy the constraints from supernovae. We compute $σ_8$ consistent with the parameters of these models. We find that the well known tension in $σ_8$ between Planck CMB and large scale structure (LSS) observations is (1) exacerbated in the HS model and (2) somewhat alleviated in the DDE model. We illustrate the importance of the $σ_8$ measurements for testing modified gravity models. Modified gravity models change the matter power spectrum at cluster scale which also depends upon the neutrino mass. We present the bound on neutrino mass in the HS and DDE model.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Bounds on Neutrino Mass in Viscous Cosmology

Effective field theory of dark matter fluid on large scales predicts the presence of viscosity of the order of $10^{-6} H_0 M_P^2$. It has been shown that this magnitude of viscosities can resolve the discordance between large scale structure observations and Planck CMB data in the $σ_8$-$Ω_m^0$ and $H_0$-$Ω_m^0$ parameters space. Massive neutrinos suppresses the matter power spectrum on the small length scales similar to the viscosities. We show that by including the effective viscosity, which arises from summing over non linear perturbations at small length scales, severely constrains the cosmological bound on neutrino masses. Under a joint analysis of Planck CMB and different large scale observation data, we find that upper bound on the sum of the neutrino masses at 2-$σ$ level, decreases from $\sum m_ν\le 0.396\,$eV (normal hierarchy) and $\sum m_ν\le 0.378 \,$eV (inverted hierarchy) to $\sum m_ν\le 0.267\,$eV (normal hierarchy) and $\sum m_ν\le 0.146\,$eV (inverted hierarchy) when the effective viscosities are included.

astro-ph.CO↗