Stringent constraints on cosmological neutrino-antineutrino asymmetries from synchronized flavor transformation

By K. Abazajian, J. Beacom, N. Bell. 2002

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We assess a mechanism which can transform neutrino-antineutrino asymmetries between flavors in the early universe, and confirm that such transformation is unavoidable in the near bi-maximal framework emerging for the neutrino mixing matrix. We show that the process is a standard Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein flavor transformation dictated by a synchronization of momentum states. We also show that flavor ``equilibration'' is a special feature of maximal mixing, and carefully examine new constraints placed on neutrino asymmetries. In particular, the big bang nucleosynthesis limit on electron neutrino degeneracy xi_e < 0.04 does not apply directly to all flavors, yet confirmation of the large-mixing-angle solution to the solar neutrino problem will eliminate the possibility of degenerate big bang nucleosynthesis.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf1b5123d2f828772774a58a43d31fa8ad96bf19

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. M. Drewes
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Citations in the corpus

• Collective neutrino flavor transitions in supernovae and the role of trajectory averaging (2007, background): “The interest of such effects for the neutrino flavor evolution in the dense SN core has long been recognized [35–39].”
• The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos (2013, background): “to make the asymmetries in individual flavours equal43 [257–259].”
• Self-induced conversion in dense neutrino gases: Pendulum in flavour space (2006, background): “Various qualitative and quantitative aspects of synchronised oscillations and applications to neutrino flavour oscillations in the early universe [18, 19, 20, 21] were studied a few years ago, motivated by the question if neutrinos with chemical potentials reach flavour equilibrium in the early univ”
• Dark energy from mass varying neutrinos (2003, unknown): “For solutions to the questions relating to sterile neutrinos in BBN, in particular those involving primordial lepton number or additional fields see [84,110–116].”
• Sterile neutrinos in cosmology (2017, background): “but asymmetries can produce interesting collective effects [90, 91, 92].”
• Self-induced conversion in dense neutrino gases : Pendulum in flavor space (2006, unknown): “Various qualitative and quantitative aspects of synchronised oscillations and applications to neutrino flavour oscillations in the early universe [18, 19, 20, 21 ] were studied a few years ago, motivated by the question if neutrinos with chemical potentials reach flavour equilibrium in the early un”