0000000000174474
AUTHOR
Pasquale D. Serpico
Relic Neutrino Decoupling Including Flavour Oscillations
In the early universe, neutrinos are slightly coupled when electron-positron pairs annihilate transferring their entropy to photons. This process originates non-thermal distortions on the neutrino spectra which depend on neutrino flavour, larger for nu_e than for nu_mu or nu_tau. We study the effect of three-neutrino flavour oscillations on the process of neutrino decoupling by solving the momentum-dependent kinetic equations for the neutrino spectra. We find that oscillations do not essentially modify the total change in the neutrino energy density, giving N_eff=3.046 in terms of the effective number of neutrinos, while the small effect over the production of primordial 4He is increased by…
Disentangling neutrino-nucleon cross section and high energy neutrino flux with akm3neutrino telescope
The energy--zenith angular event distribution in a neutrino telescope provides a unique tool to determine at the same time the neutrino-nucleon cross section at extreme kinematical regions, and the high energy neutrino flux. By using a simple parametrization for fluxes and cross sections, we present a sensitivity analysis for the case of a km^3 neutrino telescope. In particular, we consider the specific case of an under-water Mediterranean telescope placed at the NEMO site, although most of our results also apply to an under-ice detector such as IceCube. We determine the sensitivity to departures from standard values of the cross sections above 1 PeV which can be probed independently from a…
Collective flavor transitions of supernova neutrinos
We give a very brief overview of collective effects in neutrino oscillations in core collapse supernovae where refractive effects of neutrinos on themselves can considerably modify flavor oscillations, with possible repercussions for future supernova neutrino detection. We discuss synchronized and bipolar oscillations, the role of energy and angular neutrino modes, as well as three-flavor effects. We close with a short summary and some open questions.
Effects of non-standard neutrino-electron interactions on relic neutrino decoupling
We consider the decoupling of neutrinos in the early Universe in presence of non-standard neutral current neutrino-electron interactions (NSI). We first discuss a semi-analytical approach to solve the relevant kinetic equations and then present the results of fully numerical and momentum-dependent calculations, including flavor neutrino oscillations. We present our results in terms of both the effective number of neutrino species (N_eff) and the impact on the abundance of He-4 produced during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We find that, for NSI parameters within the ranges allowed by present laboratory data, non-standard neutrino-electron interactions do not essentially modify the density of rel…
Ultrahigh energy neutrinos in the Mediterranean: Detecting ντ and νμ with a km3 telescope
23 pages, 13 figures.-- PACS nrs.: 95.85.Ry, 95.55.Vj, 13.15.+g.-- ISI Article Identifier: 000245928000025.-- ArXiv pre-print available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609241
Role of dense matter in collective supernova neutrino transformations
6 pages, 2 figures.-- PACS nrs.: 14.60.Pq; 97.60.Bw.-- ArXiv pre-print available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.0659