Prospects for the direct detection of the cosmic neutrino background

Abstract

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 rests entirely on cosmological observations of, e.g., the light elemental abundances, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and the large scale distribution of matter. Here, we review more direct, weak interaction based detection techniques for the cosmic neutrino background in the present epoch and in our local neighbourhood. We show that, with current technology, all proposals are still off by some orders of magnitude in sensitivity to lead to a guaranteed detection of the relic neutrinos. The most promising laboratory search, based on neutrino capture on beta decaying nuclei, may be done in future experiments designed to measure the neutrino mass through decay kinematics.

7 pages, 5 figures, elsart.cls; invited talk presented at PANIC 2008, 9-14 November 2008, Eilat, Israel; to appear in the proceedings

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• Time of primordial Be-7 conversion into Li-7, energy release and doublet of narrow cosmological neutrino lines
• Relic neutrinos: Physically consistent treatment of effective number of neutrinos and neutrino mass
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• Detection Prospects of the Cosmic Neutrino Background
• The B-L Phase Transition: Implications for Cosmology and Neutrinos
• Relic neutrinos: Antineutrinos of Primordial Nucleosynthesis
• Bremsstrahlung from Neutrino Scattering via Magnetic Dipole Moments
• Efficiently Extracting Energy from Cosmological Neutrinos
• Proposal for Resonant Detection of Relic Massive Neutrinos
• Decaying neutrinos: The long way to isotropy
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• Probing Cosmic Neutrino Background through Parametric Fluorescence
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