No Arabic abstract
We revisit the decoupling of neutrinos in the early universe with flavour oscillations. We rederive the quantum kinetic equations which determine the neutrino evolution based on a BBGKY-like hierarchy, and include for the first time the full collision term, with both on- and off-diagonal terms for all relevant reactions. We focus on the case of zero chemical potential and solve these equations numerically. We also develop an approximate scheme based on the adiabatic evolution in the matter basis. In fact, the large difference between the oscillations and cosmological time scales allows to consider averaged flavour oscillations which can speed up the numerical integration by two orders of magnitude, when combined with a direct computation of the differential system Jacobian. The approximate numerical scheme is also useful to gain more insight into the physics of neutrino decoupling. Including the most recent results on plasma thermodynamics QED corrections, we update the effective number of neutrinos to $N_{mathrm{eff}} = 3.0440$. Finally we study the impact of flavour oscillations during neutrino decoupling on the subsequent primordial nucleosynthesis.
We examine the physics of the early universe when Majorana neutrinos (electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino) possess transition magnetic moments. These extra couplings beyond the usual weak interaction couplings alter the way neutrinos decouple from the plasma of electrons/positrons and photons. We calculate how transition magnetic moment couplings modify neutrino decoupling temperatures, and then use a full weak, strong, and electromagnetic reaction network to compute corresponding changes in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis abundance yields. We find that light element abundances and other cosmological parameters are sensitive to magnetic couplings on the order of 10^{-10} Bohr magnetons. Given the recent analysis of sub-MeV Borexino data which constrains Majorana moments to the order of 10^{-11} Bohr magnetons or less, we find that changes in cosmological parameters from magnetic contributions to neutrino decoupling temperatures are below the level of upcoming precision observations.
We propose helium-4 spallation processes induced by long-lived stau in supersymmetric standard models, and investigate an impact of the processes on light elements abundances. We show that, as long as the phase space of helium-4 spallation processes is open, they are more important than stau-catalyzed fusion and hence constrain the stau property.
We present in this work a new calculation of the standard-model benchmark value for the effective number of neutrinos, $N_{rm eff}^{rm SM}$, that quantifies the cosmological neutrino-to-photon energy densities. The calculation takes into account neutrino flavour oscillations, finite-temperature effects in the quantum electrodynamics plasma to ${cal O}(e^3)$, where $e$ is the elementary electric charge, and a full evaluation of the neutrino--neutrino collision integral. We provide furthermore a detailed assessment of the uncertainties in the benchmark $N_{rm eff}^{rm SM}$ value, through testing the values dependence on (i)~optional approximate modelling of the weak collision integrals, (ii)~measurement errors in the physical parameters of the weak sector, and (iii)~numerical convergence, particularly in relation to momentum discretisation. Our new, recommended standard-model benchmark is $N_{rm eff}^{rm SM} = 3.0440 pm 0.0002$, where the nominal uncertainty is attributed predominantly to errors incurred in the numerical solution procedure ($|delta N_{rm eff}| sim10^{-4}$), augmented by measurement errors in the solar mixing angle $sin^2theta_{12}$ ($|delta N_{rm eff}| sim10^{-4}$).
We develop the approach to the problem of neutrino oscillations in a magnetic field introduced in cite{Popov:2019nkr} and extend it to the case of three neutrino generations. The theoretical framework suitable for computation of the Dirac neutrino spin, flavour and spin-flavour oscillations probabilities in a magnetic field is given. It is shown that there is an entanglement between neutrino flavour and spin oscillations and in the general case it is not possible to consider these two types of neutrino oscillations separately. The closed analytic expressions for the probabilities of oscillations are obtained accounting for the normal and inverted hierarchies and the possible effect of CP violation. In particular, it is shown that the probabilities of the
We study the cosmological collider phenomenology of neutrinos in an effective field theory. The mass spectrum of neutrinos and their characteristic oscillatory signatures in the squeezed limit bispectrum are computed. Both dS-covariant and slow-roll corrections are considered, so is the scenario of electroweak symmetry breaking during inflation. Interestingly, we show that the slow-roll background of the inflaton provides a chemical potential for the neutrino production. The chemical potential greatly amplifies the oscillatory signal and makes the signal observably large for heavy neutrinos without the need of fine tuning.