Recently, the Planck satellite found a larger and most precise value of the matter energy density, that impacts on the present values of other cosmological parameters such as the Hubble constant, the present cluster abundances and the age of the Univ
erse. The existing tension between Planck determination of these parameters in the frame of the base LambdaCDM model and their direct measurements generated lively discussions and several interpretations. In this paper we quantify this tension by exploring several extensions of the base LambdaCDM model that include the leptonic asymmetry. We set bounds on the radiation content of the Universe and neutrino properties by using the latest cosmological measurements, imposing also self-consistent BBN constraints on the primordial helium abundance. For all cosmological asymmetric models we find the preference of cosmological data for smaller values of active and sterile neutrino masses. This increases the tension between cosmological and short baseline neutrino oscillation data that favor a sterile neutrino with the mass of around 1 eV. For the case of degenerate massive neutrinos, we find that the discrepancies with direct determinations of the Hubble constant, the present cluster abundances and the age of the Universe are alleviated at ~ 1.3 sigma for all leptonic asymmetric models. We also find ~2 sigma statistical evidence of the preference of cosmological data for the normal neutrino hierarchy. This is more evident for the case of cosmological models involving leptonic asymmetry and three massive neutrino species. We conclude that the current cosmological data favor the leptonic asymmetric extension of the base LambdaCDM model and normal neutrino mass hierarchy over the models with additional sterile neutrino species and/or inverted neutrino mass hierarchy.
For a robust interpretation of upcoming observations from PLANCK and LHC experiments it is imperative to understand how the inflationary dynamics of a non-minimally coupled Higgs scalar field with gravity may affect the determination of the inflation
ary observables. We make a full proper analysis of the WMAP7+SN+BAO dataset in the context of the non-minimally coupled Higgs inflation field with gravity. For the central value of the top quark pole mass m_T=171.3 GeV, the fit of the inflation model with non-minimally coupled Higgs scalar field leads to the Higgs boson mass between 143.7 and 167 GeV (95% CL). We show that the inflation driven by a non-minimally coupled scalar field to the Einstein gravity leads to significant constraints on the scalar spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio when compared with the similar constraints tensor to from the standard inflation with minimally coupled scalar field. We also show that an accurate reconstruction of the Higgs potential in terms of inflationary observables requires an improved accuracy of other parameters of the Standard Model of particle physics as the top quark mass and the effective QCD coupling constant.
