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arXiv · hep-ph/0506164

Relic neutrino decoupling including flavour oscillations

Abstract

In the early universe, neutrinos are slightly coupled when electron-positron pairs annihilate transferring their entropy to photons. This process originates non-thermal distortions on the neutrino spectra which depend on neutrino flavour, larger for nu_e than for nu_mu or nu_tau. We study the effect of three-neutrino flavour oscillations on the process of neutrino decoupling by solving the momentum-dependent kinetic equations for the neutrino spectra. We find that oscillations do not essentially modify the total change in the neutrino energy density, giving N_eff=3.046 in terms of the effective number of neutrinos, while the small effect over the production of primordial 4He is increased by O(20%), up to 2.1 x 10^{-4}. These results are stable within the presently favoured region of neutrino mixing parameters.

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Gianpiero Mangano, Gennaro Miele, Sergio Pastor, Teguayco Pinto, Ofelia Pisanti, Pasquale D. Serpico. 2005-06-16. Relic neutrino decoupling including flavour oscillations. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2005.09.041

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