Related papers: Precision Neutrino Counting
The early universe provides a unique laboratory for probing the frontiers of particle physics in general and neutrino physics in particular. The primordial abundances of the relic nuclei produced during the first few minutes of the…
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…
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…
In the standard Big Bang cosmology the canonical value for the ratio of relic neutrinos to CMB photons is 9/11. Within the framework of the Standard Model of particle physics there are small corrections, in sum about 1%, due to slight…
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) provide complementary probes of the early evolution of the Universe and of its particle content. Neutrinos play important roles in both cases, influencing the…
The primordial abundances of the light nuclides produced by Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) during the first 20 minutes in the evolution of the Universe are sensitive to the universal density of baryons and to the expansion rate of the early…
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 primordial Universe, neutrino decoupling occurs only slightly before electron-positron annihilations. This leads notably to an increased neutrino energy density compared to the standard instantaneous decoupling approximation,…
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…
According to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology, there should be a background of cosmic neutrinos in the present Universe, similar to the cosmic microwave photon background. The weakness of the weak interactions renders…
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) provide complementary probes of the early evolution of the Universe and of its particle content. Neutrinos play important roles in both cases, influencing the…
The standard cosmological model predicts the existence of a cosmic neutrino background with a present density of about 110 cm^{-3} per flavour, which affects big-bang nucleosynthesis, cosmic microwave background anisotropies, and the…
We discuss the present bounds on the relativistic energy density in the Universe parameterized in terms of the effective number of neutrinos N using the most recent cosmological data on Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature…
We re-investigate the evolution of the strongly degenerate neutrinos in the early universe. With the larger degeneracy, the neutrino number freezes at higher temperatures because the neutrino annihilation rate decreases. We consider very…
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…
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…
During Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), in the first 20 minutes of the evolution of the Universe, the light nuclides, D, 3He, 4He, and 7Li were synthesized in astrophysically interesting abundances. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation…
During its hot, dense, early evolution the Universe was a primordial nuclear reactor, synthesizing the light nuclides D, 3He, 4He and 7Li in the first thousand seconds. The presently observed abundances of these relic nuclides provide a…
Very different processes characterize the decoupling of neutrinos to form the cosmic neutrino background (C$\nu$B) and the much later decoupling of photons from thermal equilibrium to form the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The C$\nu$B…
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…