Related papers: Cosmic Neutrino Last Scattering Surface
The connection between cosmological observations and neutrino physics is discussed in detail. Neutrinos decouple from thermal contact in the early Universe at a temperature of order 1 MeV which coincides with the temperature where light…
Within the context of hot big-bang cosmology, a cosmic background of presently low energy neutrinos is predicted to exist in concert with the photons of the cosmic background radiation. The number density of the cosmological neutrinos is of…
The surface of last scattering of the photons in the cosmic microwave background is not a spherical shell. Apart from its finite width, each photon experiences a different gravitational potential along its journey to us, leading to…
The cosmic neutrino background (CNB) consists of low-energy relic neutrinos which decoupled from the cosmological fluid at a redshift z ~ 10^{10}. Despite being the second-most abundant particles in the universe, direct observation remains…
After neutralinos cease annihilating in the early Universe, they may still scatter elastically from other particles in the primordial plasma. At some point in time, however, they will eventually stop scattering. We calculate the cross…
We review the distortions of spectra of relic neutrinos due to the interactions with electrons, positrons, and neutrinos in the early universe. We solve integro-differential kinetic equations for the neutrino density matrix, including…
About 40 years ago, the neutrino was ruled out as the dark matter particle based on several arguments. Here I use the well-established concept of quantum uncertainties of position and momentum to describe the decoupling of neutrinos from…
It is attractive to suppose for several astrophysical reasons that the universe has close to the critical density in light (~30 eV) neutrinos which decay radiatively with a lifetime of ~10^{23} sec. In such a cosmology the universe is…
Neutrinos are the least known particle in the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. They play a crucial role in cosmology, governing the universe's evolution and shaping the large-scale structures we observe today. In this chapter,…
This article summarizes the possible roles of neutrinos in cosmology, from the first three minutes onward. The fact that primordial neutrinos are about as numerous as the photons of the cosmological background radiation means that neutrino…
Even though neutrinos and antineutrinos are everywhere in the Universe, their critical importance might be overlooked, especially because that at least one species of neutrinos has the mass 0.058 eV, far larger than the cosmic…
We derive constraints on the relic abundance of a generic particle of mass $\sim~1-10^{14}$ TeV which decays into neutrinos at cosmological epochs, using data from the Fr\'ejus and IMB nucleon decay detectors and the Fly's Eye air shower…
In the early universe, neutrinos decouple from equilibrium with the electromagnetic plasma at a temperature which is only slightly higher than the temperature where electrons and positrons annihilate. Therefore neutrinos to some extent…
A massive particle decaying into neutrinos in the early Universe is known to be less constrained than if it was decaying into other standard model particles. However, even if the decay proceeds into neutrinos, the latter still inevitably…
Neutrino physics in the early Universe is key to our understanding of later cosmological stages, such as primordial nucleosynthesis (BBN) or the formation of large-scale structures. The coming decade promises new experimental results to…
Even the elusive neutrinos are trapped in matter, albeit transiently, in several astrophysical circumstances. Their interactions with the ambient matter not only reveal the properties of such exotic matter itself, but also shed light on the…
The most abundant particles in the Universe are photons and neutrinos. Both types of particles are whirling around everywhere, since the early Universe. Hence the neutrinos are all around us, and permanently pass through our planet and our…
Atmospheric neutrinos produced by cosmic-ray interactions around the globe provide a beam for the study of neutrino properties. They are also a background in searches for neutrinos of astrophysical origin. Both aspects are addressed in this…
A calculation of neutrino decoupling in the early Universe, including full Fermi-Dirac statistics and electron mass dependence in the weak reaction rates, is presented. We find that after decoupling, the electron neutrinos contribute 0.83\%…
In the standard model neutrinos are assumed to have streamed across the Universe since they last scattered at the weak decoupling epoch when the temperature of the standard-model plasma was ~MeV. The shear stress of free-streaming neutrinos…