Search results for "Background"
showing 10 items of 556 documents
Effects of sterile neutrinos on the ultrahigh-energy cosmic neutrino flux
2003
We investigate the effect of sterile neutrinos that are nearly degenerate with active ones on the flux of ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray neutrinos at earth. This offers a way to probe neutrino oscillations in the mass-squared range (10^{-16} eV^2 < ��m^2 < 10^{-11} eV^2) which maybe hard to detect by any other means. Taking into account the present experimental uncertainties of the active-active mixing angles and by allowing any values for the active-sterile mixing angles we find that the ratio of the electron and muon neutrino fluxes may change by -40 % to 70 % in comparison with the ratio in the absence of active-sterile mixing.
Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies from second order gravitational perturbations
1997
This paper presents a complete analysis of the effects of second order gravitational perturbations on Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies, taking explicitly into account scalar, vector and tensor modes. We also consider the second order perturbations of the metric itself obtaining them, for a universe dominated by a collision-less fluid, in the Poisson gauge, by transforming the known results in the synchronous gauge. We discuss the resulting second order anisotropies in the Poisson gauge, and analyse the possible relevance of the different terms. We expect that, in the simplest scenarios for structure formation, the main effect comes from the gravitational lensing by scalar perturbati…
Pinch technique at two loops: The case of massless Yang-Mills theories
2000
The generalization of the pinch technique beyond one loop is presented. It is shown that the crucial physical principles of gauge-invariance, unitarity, and gauge-fixing-parameter independence single out at two loops exactly the same algorithm which has been used to define the pinch technique at one loop, without any additional assumptions. The two-loop construction of the pinch technique gluon self-energy, and quark-gluon vertex are carried out in detail for the case of mass-less Yang-Mills theories, such as perturbative QCD. We present two different but complementary derivations. First we carry out the construction by directly rearranging two-loop diagrams. The analysis reveals that, quit…
Unveiling ν secrets with cosmological data: Neutrino masses and mass hierarchy
2017
Using some of the latest cosmological datasets publicly available, we derive the strongest bounds in the literature on the sum of the three active neutrino masses, $M_\nu$, within the assumption of a background flat $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. In the most conservative scheme, combining Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies and baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) data, as well as the up-to-date constraint on the optical depth to reionization ($\tau$), the tightest $95\%$ confidence level (C.L.) upper bound we find is $M_\nu0.06\,{\rm eV}$ from oscillations data would raise the quoted upper bounds by ${\cal O}(0.1\sigma)$ and would not affect our conclusions.
Most constraining cosmological neutrino mass bounds
2021
We present here up-to-date neutrino mass limits exploiting the most recent cosmological data sets. By making use of the cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuation and polarization measurements, supernovae Ia luminosity distances, baryon acoustic oscillation observations and determinations of the growth rate parameter, we are able to set the most constraining bound to date, $\ensuremath{\sum}{m}_{\ensuremath{\nu}}l0.09\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ at 95% C.L. This very tight limit is obtained without the assumption of any prior on the value of the Hubble constant and highly compromises the viability of the inverted mass ordering as the underlying neutrino mass pattern in nature. The …
Pair production of helicity-flipped neutrinos in supernovae.
1990
The emissivity was calculated for the pair production of helicity-flipped neutrinos, in a way that can be used in supernova calculations. Also presented are simple estimates which show that such process can act as an efficient energy-loss mechanism in the shocked supernova core, and this fact is used to extract neutrino mass limits from SN 1987A neutrino observations.
Charge and magnetic moment of the neutrino in the background field method and in the linear R-xi(L) gauge
1999
We present a computation of the charge and the magnetic moment of the neutrino in the recently developed electro-weak Background Field Method and in the linear $R_{\xi}^L$ gauge. First, we deduce a formal Ward-Takahashi identity which implies the immediate cancellation of the neutrino electric charge. This Ward-Takahashi identity is as simple as that for QED. The computation of the (proper and improper) one loop vertex diagrams contributing to the neutrino electric charge is also presented in an arbitrary gauge, checking in this way the Ward-Takahashi identity previously obtained. Finally, the calculation of the magnetic moment of the neutrino, in the minimal extension of the Standard Model…
Invisible neutrino decay in precision cosmology
2021
We revisit the topic of invisible neutrino decay in the precision cosmological context, via a first-principles approach to understanding the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure phenomenology of such a non-standard physics scenario. Assuming an effective Lagrangian in which a heavier standard-model neutrino $\nu_H$ couples to a lighter one $\nu_l$ and a massless scalar particle $\phi$ via a Yukawa interaction, we derive from first principles the complete set of Boltzmann equations, at both the spatially homogeneous and the first-order inhomogeneous levels, for the phase space densities of $\nu_H$, $\nu_l$, and $\phi$ in the presence of the relevant decay and inverse decay p…
The present and future of the most favoured inflationary models after $Planck$ 2015
2015
The value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ in the region allowed by the latest $Planck$ 2015 measurements can be associated to a large variety of inflationary models. We discuss here the potential of future Cosmic Microwave Background cosmological observations in disentangling among the possible theoretical scenarios allowed by our analyses of current $Planck$ temperature and polarization data. Rather than focusing only on $r$, we focus as well on the running of the primordial power spectrum, $\alpha_s$ and the running of thereof, $\beta_s$. Our Fisher matrix method benefits from a detailed and realistic appraisal of the expected foregrounds. Future cosmological probes, as the COrE mission…
Can interacting dark energy solve the $H_0$ tension?
2017
The answer is Yes! We indeed find that interacting dark energy can alleviate the current tension on the value of the Hubble constant $H_0$ between the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies constraints obtained from the Planck satellite and the recent direct measurements reported by Riess et al. 2016. The combination of these two datasets points towards an evidence for a non-zero dark matter-dark energy coupling $\xi$ at more than two standard deviations, with $\xi=-0.26_{-0.12}^{+0.16}$ at $95\%$ CL. However the $H_0$ tension is better solved when the equation of state of the interacting dark energy component is allowed to freely vary, with a phantom-like equation of state $w=-1.184\pm0.…