English

Cosmological lepton asymmetry with a nonzero mixing angle \theta_{13}

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2012-07-12 v3 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

While the baryon asymmetry of the Universe is nowadays well measured by cosmological observations, the bounds on the lepton asymmetry in the form of neutrinos are still significantly weaker. We place limits on the relic neutrino asymmetries using some of the latest cosmological data, taking into account the effect of flavor oscillations. We present our results for two different values of the neutrino mixing angle \theta_{13}, and show that for large \theta_{13} the limits on the total neutrino asymmetry become more stringent, diluting even large initial flavor asymmetries. In particular, we find that the present bounds are still dominated by the limits coming from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, while the limits on the total neutrino mass from cosmological data are essentially independent of \theta_{13}. Finally, we perform a forecast for COrE, taken as an example of a future CMB experiment, and find that it could improve the limits on the total lepton asymmetry approximately by up to a factor 6.6.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1204.2510,
  title  = {Cosmological lepton asymmetry with a nonzero mixing angle \theta_{13}},
  author = {Emanuele Castorina and Urbano Franca and Massimiliano Lattanzi and Julien Lesgourgues and Gianpiero Mangano and Alessandro Melchiorri and Sergio Pastor},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.2510},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

11 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables. v2: updated COrE specifications. v3: matches Phys. Rev. D accepted version