Massive Decaying Tau Neutrino and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

Abstract

Comparing Big Bang Nucleosynthesis predictions with the light element abundances inferred from observational data, we can obtain the strong constraints on some neutrino properties, e.g. number of neutrino species, mass, lifetime. Recently the deuterium abundances were measured in high red-shift QSO absorption systems. It is expected that they are close to the primordial values, however, two groups have reported inconsistent values which are different in one order of magnitude. In this paper we show how we can constrain on $\tau$ neutrino mass and its lifetime in each case when we adopt either high or low deuterium data. We find that if $0.01 \sec \lesssim τ_{\nutau} \lesssim 1 \sec$ and $10\mev \lesssim m_{\nutau} \lesssim 24\mev$, the theoretical predictions agree with the low D/H abundances. On the other hand if we adopt the high D/H abundances, we obtain the upper bound of $\tau$ neutrino mass, $m_{\nutau}\lesssim 20 \mev$.

11 pages, using LATEX and four postscript figures

Cited by in corpus (16)

• MeV-scale Reheating Temperature and Thermalization of Neutrino Background
• Neutrinos in cosmology
• Cosmological Constraints on Late-time Entropy Production
• Radiative Decay of a Long-Lived Particle and Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Radiative decay of a massive particle and the non-thermal process in primordial nucleosynthesis
• Big bang nucleosynthesis limit on N_nu
• A Mechanism for Ordinary-Sterile Neutrino Mixing
• The Small Observed Baryon Asymmetry from a Large Lepton Asymmetry
• Cosmological Nucleosynthesis and Active-Sterile Neutrino Oscillations with Small Mass Differences: The Nonresonant Case
• Inhomogeneous Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis in Light of Recent Observations
• Big Bang Nucleosynthesis with Matter--Antimatter Domains
• Cosmological nucleosynthesis and active-sterile neutrino oscillations with small mass differences: The resonant case
• Implications of the ${\nu }_{\mu }\to {\nu }_s$ solution to the atmospheric neutrino anomaly for early Universe cosmology
• Unstable massive tau-neutrinos and primordial nucleosynthesis
• Probing neutrino decays with the cosmic microwave background
• Scenario of Light Sterile Neutrinos with A Heavy Tau Neutrino in A Supersymmetric Model