Maximum lepton asymmetry from active-sterile neutrino oscillations in the Early Universe

Abstract

A large lepton asymmetry could be generated in the Early Universe by oscillations of active to sterile neutrinos with a small mixing angle sin 2 θ< 10^-2. The final order of magnitude of the lepton asymmetry ηis mainly determined by its growth in the last stage of evolution when the MSW resonance dominates the kinetic equations. In this paper we present a simple way of calculating the maximum possible lepton asymmetry which can be created. Our results are in good agreement to previous calculations. Furthermore, we find that the growth of asymmetry does not obey any particular power law. We find that the maximum possible asymmetry at the freeze-out of the n/p ratio at T \sim 1 MeV strongly depends on the mass-squared difference δm^2: the asymmetry is negligible for δm^2 \ll 1 eV^2 and reaches asymptotically large values for δm^2 \ge 50 eV^2.

14 pp, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Heavy sterile neutrinos: Bounds from big-bang nucleosynthesis and SN 1987A
• Cosmological and astrophysical bounds on a heavy sterile neutrino and the KARMEN anomaly

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Active-sterile neutrino oscillations in the early Universe: asymmetry generation at low |delta m^2| and the Landau-Zener approximation
• Neutrino oscillations in the early universe. Resonant case
• Higher order correction to the neutrino self-energy in a medium and its astrophysical applications
• A New Census of the Universe's Entropy
• Neutrino oscillations and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis