There are many hints, coming from cosmological observations, that the so-called Standard Model of physics is incomplete: dark matter, dark energy and baryogenesis, to mention a few. As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) continues to give no new clues as to new physical effects, it is necessary to turn to other avenues. The primordial universe is a laboratory for matter at high energies and densities, the earliest moments of which cannot easily be probed by accelerator experiments. Details on the early universe are encoded in the anisotropies, or fluctuations, of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Systematic analysis can be done to constrain possible models of beyond the standard model physics using current experimental data. Forecasts can be made to determine the power of future experiments. The complexity of the problem requires numerical methods to be developed and employed. The most successful are Markov Chain MonteCarlo techniques. Using these techniques we propose to constrain possible beyond the standard model parameters. In particular we propose to study non standard neutrino-neutrino interactions, axion-photon interaction strength and more complicated models which solve all cosmological problems at once.
The hope is to improve upon limits of known interactions in the standard model. As has been pointed out, unless LHC finds some new interesting signal in the following years, accelerator experiments are likely to be stalled for some time due to the high cost. On the other hand, improving CMB anisotropies observations is relatively less costly and potentially more rewarding. It can be argued then that new constraints on beyond the standard model physics can be made by analyzing the primordial universe and that is the objective of this research project. Because this area has the potential to become the state of the art in new searches for BSM physics, it is important that italian physics departments focus on what can be achieved in this area.