Cosmological constraints on the neutron lifetime

Abstract

We derive new constraints on the neutron lifetime based on the recent Planck 2015 observations of temperature and polarization anisotropies of the CMB. Under the assumption of standard Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, we show that Planck data constrains the neutron lifetime to ${\tau }_n=(907\pm 69)[\text{s}]$ at $68\%$ c.l.. Moreover, by including the direct measurements of primordial Helium abundance of Aver et al. (2015) and Izotov et al. (2014), we show that cosmological data provide the stringent constraints ${\tau }_n=(875\pm 19)[\text{s}]$ and ${\tau }_n=(921\pm 11)[\text{s}]$ respectively. The latter appears to be in tension with neutron lifetime value quoted by the Particle Data Group (${\tau }_n=(880.3\pm 1.1)[\text{s}]$). Future CMB surveys as COrE+, in combination with a weak lensing survey as EUCLID, could constrain the neutron lifetime up to a $\sim 6[\text{s}]$ precision.

13 pages, 3 figures. Matching JCAP accepted version

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Exploring Cosmic Origins with CORE: Cosmological Parameters
• Neutron lifetime measurements with the big gravitational trap for ultracold neutrons
• Updating constraints on f(T) teleparallel cosmology and the consistency with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Electromagnetic instability of compact axion stars
• Neutron Lifetime Anomaly and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
• MFV approach to robust estimate of neutron lifetime
• A meta-analysis of neutron lifetime measurements
• The impact of theoretical assumptions in the determination of the neutrino effective number from future CMB measurements