Related papers: Do observations prove that cosmological neutrinos …
I review some of the basic information on the Cosmic Neutrino Background momentum distribution. In particular, I discuss how present data from several cosmological observables such as Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, Cosmic Microwave Background…
We point out that, for Dirac neutrinos, in addition to the standard thermal cosmic neutrino background (C$\nu$B) there could also exist a non-thermal neutrino background with comparable number density. As the right-handed components are…
One of the primary targets of current and future cosmological observations are light thermal relics of the hot big bang. Within the Standard Model of particle physics, an important thermal relic are cosmic neutrinos, while interesting…
We show how the $^4$He-abundance in the early Universe can be used to demonstrate that macroscopic samples of neutrinos in thermal equilibrium are indeed distributed according to Fermi-Dirac statistics.
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…
The Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) encodes a wealth of information, but has not yet been observed directly. To determine the prospects of detection and to study its information content, we reconstruct the phase-space distribution of local…
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…
The hot dense environment of the early universe is known to have produced large numbers of baryons, photons, and neutrinos. These extreme conditions may have also produced other long-lived species, including new light particles (such as…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations have been used extensively to constrain key properties of neutrinos, such as their mass. However, these inferences are typically dependent on assumptions about the cosmological model, and in…
Cosmological measurements of the radiation density in the early universe can be used as a sensitive probe of physics beyond the standard model. Observations of primordial light element abundances have long been used to place non-trivial…
If massive neutrinos are Dirac particles, the proposed PTOLEMY experiment will hopefully be able to discover cosmic neutrino background via $\nu^{}_e + {^3}{\rm H} \to {^3}{\rm He} + e^-$ with a capture rate of $\Gamma^{}_{\rm D} \approx…
The standard Big Bang cosmology predicts the existence of an, as yet undetected, relic neutrino background, similar to the photons observed in the cosmic microwave background. If neutrinos have mass, then such relic neutrinos are a natural…
We investigate the effect of potentially large distortions of the relic neutrino spectra on cosmological observables. To that end, we consider a phenomenological model of "gray" spectral distributions, described by a single parameter, which…
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…
We consider some consequences of the presence of a cosmological lepton asymmetry in the form of neutrinos. A relic neutrino degeneracy enhances the contribution of massive neutrinos to the present energy density of the Universe, and…
We discuss how a laboratory detection of a sterile neutrino not only would constitute a fundamental discovery of a new particle, but could also provide an indication of the evolution of the Universe before Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), a…
The existence of prolonged radiation domination prior to the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), starting just after the inflationary epoch, is not yet established unanimously. If instead, the universe undergoes a non-standard cosmological…
Annihilation of extremely energetic cosmic neutrinos on the relic-neutrino background can give rise to absorption lines at energies corresponding to formation of the electroweak gauge boson $Z^{0}$. The positions of the absorption dips are…
The existence of a cosmic neutrino background -- the analogue of the cosmic microwave background -- is a fundamental prediction of standard big bang cosmology. Up to now, the observational evidence for its existence is rather indirect and…
The combination of detections of anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and observations of the large-scale distribution of galaxies probes the primordial density fluctuations of the universe on spatial scales varying by…