Related papers: Neutrinos, WMAP, and BBN
Concern about systematic uncertainty in the $^4$He abundance as well as the chemical evolution of $^3$He leads us to re-examine this important limit. It is shown that with conservative assumptions no more than the equivalent of 4 massless…
New results, namely the independent determination of the deuterium abundance in several quasar absorption systems, and the complementary determination of the cosmological baryon density by observations of anisotropies in the cosmic…
We use the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data on the spectrum of cosmic microwave background anisotropies to put constraints on the present amount of lepton asymmetry L, parameterized by the dimensionless chemical potential…
Short-baseline neutrino anomalies suggest the existence of low-mass ( m \sim O(1)~eV) sterile neutrinos \nu_s. These would be efficiently produced in the early universe by oscillations with active neutrino species, leading to a thermal…
The cosmic energy density in the form of radiation before and during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is typically parameterized in terms of the effective number of neutrinos N_eff. This quantity, in case of no extra degrees of freedom,…
The current status of the physics of massive neutrinos is reviewed with a forward-looking emphasis. The article begins with the general phenomenology of neutrino oscillations in vacuum and matter and documents the experimental evidence for…
The compelling experimental evidences for oscillations of solar, reactor, atmospheric and accelerator neutrinos imply the existence of 3-neutrino mixing in the weak charged lepton current. The current data on the 3-neutrino mixing…
In light of the recent BICEP2 B-mode polarization detection, which implies a large inflationary tensor-to-scalar ratio r_{0.05}=0.2^{+0.07}_{-0.05}, we re-examine the evidence for an extra sterile massive neutrino, originally invoked to…
The recently published cosmological bound on the absolute neutrino masses obtained from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data has important consequences for neutrino experiments and models. Taken at face value, the new bound…
In this work we investigate the impact of two phenomenological Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) scenarios concerning the role of neutrinos in the early universe: non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) and non-unitary three-neutrino mixing.…
The South Pole Telescope (SPT), Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have each reported measurements of the cosmic microwave background's (CMB) angular power spectrum which favor the existence…
We explore the possible implications that new families, that are being searched for at the LHC, would have on neutrino masses. In particular, we have explored the possibility that the smallness of the observed neutrino masses is naturally…
Big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) probes the cosmic mass-energy density at temperatures $\sim 10$ MeV to $\sim 100$ keV. Here, we consider the effect of a cosmic matter-like species that is non-relativistic and pressureless during BBN. Such a…
The symmetry between quarks and leptons suggests that neutrinos should have mass. As embodied in the grand unified theory SO(10) this yields masses that can only be detected by neutrino oscillations. Such oscillations could be very…
After a short introduction on the predicted cosmic neutrino background in the universe, we review some of the cosmological bounds related to neutrinos. In particular we show how the recent data on the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave…
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…
New experimental results, if correct, require at least one light sterile neutrino, in addition to the three active ones, to accommodate the mass differences required to explain the solar $\nu_e$ deficit, the anomalous $\nu/e$ ratio produced…
The basic characteristics used for the description of both Dirac and Majorana massive neutrinos are studied. Currently available experimental data for these characteristics are presented with an evidence of possible anomalies beyond the…
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 standard big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) framework, the baryon density measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) or the primordial D abundance is much higher than the one…