Speaker
Jan Hamann
(LAPTH Annecy-le-Vieux)
Description
Data from future high-precision Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurements will be sensitive to the primordial Helium abundance. At the same time, this parameter can be predicted from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) as a function of the baryon and radiation densities, as well as a neutrino chemical potential, which allows us to place a self-consistent prior on the Helium abundance. We will demonstrate how this approach leads to a significant improvement in constraints on the values of cosmological parameters inferred from simulated Planck data, and can help probe scenarios beyond the current cosmological standard model.
