Relic neutrinos: Physically consistent treatment of effective number of neutrinos and neutrino mass

Abstract

We perform a model independent study of the neutrino momentum distribution at freeze-out, treating the freeze-out temperature as a free parameter. Our results imply that measurement of neutrino reheating, as characterized by the measurement of the effective number of neutrinos $N_{\nu }$, amounts to the determination of the neutrino kinetic freeze-out temperature within the context of the standard model of particle physics where the number of neutrino flavors is fixed and no other massless (fractional) particles arise. At temperatures on the order of the neutrino mass, we show how cosmic background neutrino properties i.e. energy density, pressure, particle density, are modified in a physically consistent way as a function of neutrino mass and $N_{\nu }$.

12 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Planck 2013 results. XVI. Cosmological parameters
• Nine-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Parameter Results
• Massive neutrinos and cosmology
• Neutrinos And Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Heavy Flavor Hadrons in Statistical Hadronization of Strangeness-rich QGP
• Effects of non-standard neutrino-electron interactions on relic neutrino decoupling
• Improved limit on electron neutrino charge radius through a new evaluation of the weak mixing angle
• Fugacity and Reheating of Primordial Neutrinos

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Relic Neutrino Freeze-out: Dependence on Natural Constants
• Touch of Neutrinos on the Vacuum Metamorphosis: is the $H_0$ Solution Back?
• Cosmological Implications of Light Sterile Neutrinos produced after the QCD Phase Transition
• A short survey of matter-antimatter evolution in the primordial universe
• Quark-Gluon Plasma as the Possible Source of Cosmological Dark Radiation
• Probing dark photons in the early universe with big bang nucleosynthesis
• Boltzmann Equation Solver Adapted to Emergent Chemical Non-equilibrium
• Cosmological Strangeness Abundance
• Cosmic Neutrino Decoupling and its Observable Imprints: Insights from Entropic-Dual Transport
• Effect of neutrino rest mass on ionization equilibrium freeze-out
• Proposal for Resonant Detection of Relic Massive Neutrinos
• Effects of quantum statistics on relic density of Dark Radiation
• Fermi-Dirac Integrals in Degenerate Regimes: A Novel Asymptotic Expansion
• Reactions Governing Strangeness Abundance in Primordial Universe
• Possibility of bottom-catalyzed matter genesis near to primordial QGP hadronization
• The hot Hagedorn Universe
• Temperature Dependence of the Neutron Lifespan
• Quarks to Cosmos: Particles and Plasma in Cosmological evolution
• Lepton Number and Expansion of the Universe
• Higgs Thermal Nonequilibrium in Primordial QGP