Gravitational clustering of relic neutrinos and implications for their detection

By A. Ringwald, Y. Wong. 2004

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the gravitational clustering of big bang relic neutrinos onto existing cold dark matter (CDM) and baryonic structures within the flat ΛCDM model, using both numerical simulations and a semi-analytical linear technique, with the aim of understanding the neutrinos’ clustering properties for direct detection purposes. In a comparative analysis, we find that the linear technique systematically underestimates the amount of clustering for a wide range of CDM halo and neutrino masses. This invalidates earlier claims of the technique’s applicability. We then compute the approximate phase space distribution of relic neutrinos in our neighbourhood at Earth, and estimate the large scale neutrino density contrasts within the local Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin zone. With these findings, we discuss the implications of gravitational neutrino clustering for scattering-based detection methods, ranging from flux detection via Cavendish-type torsion balances, to target detection using accelerator beams and cosmic rays. For emission spectroscopy via resonant annihilation of extremely energetic cosmic neutrinos on the relic neutrino background, we give new estimates for the expected enhancement in the event rates in the direction of the Virgo cluster.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cca264a6e7284f23b133eb77acef1177fb914d46

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Citations in the corpus

Accurate halo-model matter power spectra with dark energy, massive neutrinos and modified gravitational forces (2016, background): “In reality, we expect the neutrinos to start falling into the potential wells of the cold matter once they become non-relativistic and to eventually form neutrino haloes around those of CDM (e.g., Ringwald & Wong 2004; Abazajian et al. 2005); but this is ignored in our modelling.”
Neutrino Mass in Cosmology: Status and Prospects (2011, background): “Neutrinos are born with a large thermal velocity, which makes them difficult to capture into potential wells corresponding to wavenumbers larger than the so-called free-streaming wavenumber [23], kfs = 1.”
Cosmology with massive neutrinos I: towards a realistic modeling of the relation between matter, haloes and galaxies (2013, methodology): “In particular, those works considered the clustering of relic neutrinos within the gravitational potential wells of CDM haloes [22–26] and the impact of neutrino masses on: the non-linear matter power spectrum [27–35], the Lyman-α forest [32, 36], the halo mass function [24, 36, 37] and the redshift”
An efficient implementation of massive neutrinos in non-linear structure formation simulations (2012, methodology): “It only fails to resolve neutrino clustering in the most massive galaxy clusters, in which neutrinos do cluster non-linearly (Ringwald & Wong 2004); however, it should be easy to perform zoomed simulations of these clusters using our method as a base.”
Detecting non-relativistic cosmic neutrinos by capture on tritium: phenomenology and physics potential (2014, background): “[34] in the last two columns of Table 1.”
Light composite Higgs boson from higher representations versus electroweak precision measurements: P (2005, background): “Indeed if it turns out to be absolutely stable it will have to cluster [124] [51] rather than be distributed homogeneously in the universe as is assumed when deriving bounds on its mass [52, 53].”