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Cosmological Neutrino Background Revisited

Astrophysics 2009-10-30 v4

Abstract

We solve the Boltzmann equation for cosmological neutrinos around the epoch of the electron-positron annihilation in order to verify the freeze-out approximation and to compute accurately the cosmological neutrino distribution function. We find the radiation energy density to be about 0.3% higher than the one predicted by the freeze-out approximation. As a result, the spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies changes by 0.3-05%, depending on the angular scale, and the amplitude of the mass fluctuations on scales below about 100 h^{-1} Mpc decreases by about 0.2-0.3%.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9712199,
  title  = {Cosmological Neutrino Background Revisited},
  author = {Nickolay Y. Gnedin and Oleg Y. Gnedin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9712199},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

An error is corrected, figure revised; submitted to ApJ