Reconstructing the early-Universe expansion and thermal history

We present a model-independent reconstruction of the early expansion and thermal histories of the Universe, obtained from light element abundance measurements. The expansion history is tightly constrained around the onset of the big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). The temperature of photons is additionally constrained around the time of neutrino decoupling. Allowing for perturbations to the standard expansion rate, we find that the radiation energy density is constrained to within 15% of its value, and only 1% extra matter energy density is allowed around the epoch of BBN. We introduce a new and general analytic fitting formula for the temperature variation, which is flexible enough to reproduce the signal of large classes of beyond-CDM particle models that can alter the temperature through early-time energy injection. We present its constraints from BBN data and from the measurements of effective number of relativistic species and helium-4 abundance probed by the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy. Our results provide clarity on the most fundamental properties of the early Universe, reconstructed with minimal assumptions about the unknown physics that can occur at keV--MeV energy scales and can be mapped to broad classes of models of interest to cosmology.