Search results for "Neutrino decoupling"
showing 8 items of 8 documents
Relic Neutrino Decoupling Including Flavour Oscillations
2005
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…
Towards a precision calculation of the effective number of neutrinos 𝖭_𝖾𝖿𝖿 in the Standard Model. Part II. Neutrino decoupling in the presence of…
2021
Abstract We present in this work a new calculation of the standard-model benchmark value for the effective number of neutrinos, Neff SM, that quantifies the cosmological neutrino-to-photon energy densities. The calculation takes into account neutrino flavour oscillations, finite-temperature effects in the quantum electrodynamics plasma to O(e3), where e is the elementary electric charge, and a full evaluation of the neutrino-neutrino collision integral. We provide furthermore a detailed assessment of the uncertainties in the benchmark Neff SM value, through testing the value's dependence on (i) optional approximate modelling of the weak collision integrals, (ii) measurement errors in the ph…
Lepton number asymmetries and the lower bound on the reheating temperature
2017
We show that the reheating temperature of a matter-domination era in the early universe can be pushed down to the neutrino decoupling temperature at around $2 \ {\rm MeV}$ if the reheating takes place through non-hadronic decays of the dominant matter and neutrino-antineutrino asymmetries are still large enough, $|L| \gtrsim \mathcal{O}(10^{-2})$ (depending on the neutrino flavor) at the end of reheating.
Revisiting cosmological bounds on sterile neutrinos
2014
We employ state-of-the art cosmological observables including supernova surveys and BAO information to provide constraints on the mass and mixing angle of a non-resonantly produced sterile neutrino species, showing that cosmology can effectively rule out sterile neutrinos which decay between BBN and the present day. The decoupling of an additional heavy neutrino species can modify the time dependence of the Universe's expansion between BBN and recombination and, in extreme cases, lead to an additional matter-dominated period; while this could naively lead to a younger Universe with a larger Hubble parameter, it could later be compensated by the extra radiation expected in the form of neutri…
Cosmological radiation density with non-standard neutrino-electron interactions
2021
Neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI) with electrons are known to alter the picture of neutrino decoupling from the cosmic plasma. NSI modify both flavour oscillations through matter effects, and the annihilation and scattering between neutrinos and electrons and positrons in the thermal plasma. In view of the forthcoming cosmological observations, we perform a precision study of the impact of non-universal and flavour-changing NSI on the effective number of neutrinos, $N_{eff}$. We present the variation of $N_{eff}$ arising from the different NSI parameters and discuss the existing degeneracies among them, from cosmology alone and in relation to the current bounds from terrestrial exper…
Cosmology with a very light Lμ − Lτ gauge boson
2019
In this paper, we explore in detail the cosmological implications of an abelian L − L gauge extension of the Standard Model featuring a light and weakly coupled Z′. Such a scenario is motivated by the longstanding ∼ 4σ discrepancy between the measured and predicted values of the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment, (g − 2) , as well as the tension between late and early time determinations of the Hubble constant. If sufficiently light, the Z′ population will decay to neutrinos, increasing the overall energy density of radiation and altering the expansion history of the early universe. We identify two distinct regions of parameter space in this model in which the Hubble tension can be significa…
Effects of non-standard neutrino-electron interactions on relic neutrino decoupling
2006
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…
Neff versus the lightest neutrino mass
2016
AbstractWithin the framework of low-scale Type I seesaw models with two and three extra sterile neutrinos we evaluate the production of the sterile states in the Early Universe. We explore the full parameter space and find that in the model with two extra states both of them reach thermal equilibrium with the primordial plasma. In the model with three sterile neutrinos, if the lightest active neutrino mass is below O(10−3eV) one sterile neutrino might not thermalize, while the other two always reach thermalization. Applying constrains from both extra radiation at BBN and CMB, and the dark matter allowed abundance, we show that the spectra of heavier states are severely restricted in the mas…