Neutrinos decoupled from the rest of the cosmic plasma when the Universe was less than one second old, far earlier than the photons which decoupled at t=380,000 years. Surprisingly, though, the last scattering surface of the neutrinos is much closer to us than that of the photons. Here we calculate the properties of the last scattering surfaces of the three species of neutrinos.
We study gravitational lensing of the cosmic neutrino background. This signal is undetectable for the foreseeable future, but there is a rich trove of information available. At least some of the neutrinos from the early universe will be non-relativistic today, with a closer surface of last scattering (compared to the cosmic microwave background) and with larger angles of deflection. Lensing of massive neutrinos is strongly chromatic: both the amplitude of lensing and the cosmic time at which the potential is traversed depend on neutrino momentum, in principle giving access to our entire causal…
We present the first simulation capable of resolving the structure of neutrino clustering on Mpc scales. The method combines grid- and particle-based methods and achieves very good accuracy on both small and large scales, while keeping CPU consumption under control. Such simulations are not only ideal for calculating the non-linear matter power spectrum but also particularly relevant for studies of how neutrinos cluster in galaxy- or cluster-sized halos. We perform the largest neutrino N-body simulation to date, effectively containing 10 different neutrino hot dark matter components with diffe…
The cosmic neutrino background is an important component of the Universe that is difficult to include in cosmological simulations due to the extremely large velocity dispersion of neutrino particles. We develop a new approach to simulate cosmic neutrinos that decomposes the Fermi-Dirac phase space into shells of constant speed and then evolves those shells using hydrodynamic equations. These collisionless hydrodynamic equations are chosen to match linear theory, free particle evolution and allow for superposition. We implement this method into the information-optimized cosmological $N$-body co…
The existence of a cosmic neutrino background -- the analogue of the cosmic microwave background -- is a fundamental prediction of standard big bang cosmology. Up to now, the observational evidence for its existence is rather indirect and rests entirely on cosmological observations of, e.g., the light elemental abundances, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and the large scale distribution of matter. Here, we review more direct, weak interaction based detection techniques for the cosmic neutrino background in the present epoch and in our local neighbourhood. We show that, wit…
The cosmic neutrino background anisotropy is calculated for massive neutrino states by solving the full Boltzmann equation. The effect of weak gravitational lensing, including the Limber approximation, is also derived for massive particles, and subsequently applied to the case of massive neutrinos.
Astrophysical neutrinos are expected to be produced in the interactions of ultra-high energy cosmic-rays with surrounding photons. The fluxes of the astrophysical neutrinos are highly dependent on the characteristics of the cosmic-ray sources, such as their cosmological distributions. We study possible constraints on the properties of cosmic-ray sources in a model-independent way using experimentally obtained diffuse neutrino flux above 100 PeV. The semi-analytic formula is derived to estimate the cosmogenic neutrino fluxes as functions of source evolution parameter and source extension in red…
The standard model of cosmology predicts the existence of cosmic neutrino background in the present Universe. To detect cosmic relic neutrinos in the vicinity of the Earth, it is necessary to evaluate the gravitational clustering effects on relic neutrinos in the Milky Way. Here we introduce a reweighting technique in the N-one-body simulation method, so that a single simulation can yield neutrino density profiles for different neutrino masses and phase space distributions. In light of current experimental results that favor small neutrino masses, the neutrino number density contrast around th…
Neutrinos are key astronomical messengers, because they are undeflected by magnetic field and unattenuated by electromagnetic interaction. After the first detection of extraterrestrial neutrinos in the TeV-PeV region by Neutrino Telescopes we are entering a new epoch where neutrino astronomy becomes possible. In this paper I briefly review the main issues concerning cosmological neutrinos and their experimental observation.
It is suggested that Goldstone bosons may be masquerading as fractional cosmic neutrinos, contributing about 0.39 to what is reported as the effective number of neutrino types in the era before recombination. The broken symmetry associated with these Goldstone bosons is further speculated to be the conservation of the particles of dark matter.
Neutrino production of radio Cherenkov signals in the Moon is the object of radio telescope observations. Depending on the energy range and detection parameters, the dominant contribution to the neutrino signal may come from interactions of the neutrino on the Moon facing the telescope, rather than neutrinos that have traversed a portion of the Moon. Using the approximate analytic expression of the effective lunar aperture from a recent paper by Gayley, Mutel and Jaeger, we evaluate the background from cosmic ray interactions in the lunar regolith. We also consider the modifications to the eff…
The KATRIN neutrino experiment is a next-generation tritium beta decay experiment aimed at measuring the mass of the electron neutrino to better than 200 meV at 90% C.L. Due to its intense tritium source, KATRIN can also serve as a possible target for the process of neutrino capture, νe +3H \to 3He+ + e-. The latter process, possessing no energy threshold, is sensitive to the Cosmic Neutrino Background (CνB). In this paper, we explore the potential sensitivity of the KATRIN experiment to the relic neutrino density. The KATRIN experiment is sensitive to a CνB over-density ratio of 2.0x 10^9 ove…
Neutrinos rotating around Abelian Higgs strings will generate a neutral current close to the string. As the string moves through the cosmic plasma, the velocity kick generated by the motion of the string will enhance the neutrino current in the wake region. The neutrino current density depends on its distance from the string and is oscillatory in nature. This leads to neutrino density gradients in the plasma. Such a flux of neutrinos with periodic density fluctuations will lead to electron currents in the plasma. The current will act like a cross-perturbation across the cosmic string wake. The…
The Hot Big Bang model predicts the existence of a \emph{cosmic neutrino background}. The number of particles and anti-particles in this primordial bath of neutrinos can be different -- a memory of processes that took place at very early epochs. If neutrinos were massless, this asymmetry would not change once neutrinos froze out. However, in the case of massive particles, the asymmetry is not protected by conservation laws and can get erased via helicity-flipping scatterings off matter inhomogeneities. We evaluate this helicity-flipping rate and demonstrate that if relic lepton asymmetry ever …
We propose a supersymmetric scenario in which the small Yukawa couplings for the Dirac neutrino mass term are generated by the spontaneous-breaking of Pecci-Quinn symmetry. In this scenario, a right amount of dark matter relic density can be obtained by either right-handed sneutrino or axino LSP, and a sizable amount of axion dark radiation can be obtained. Interestingly, the decay of right-handed sneutrino NLSP to axino LSP is delayed to around the present epoch, and can leave an observable cosmological background of neutrinos at the energy scale of $\mathcal{O}(10-100) {\rm GeV}$.
The latest IceCube data suggest that the all-flavor cosmic neutrino flux may be as large as 10^-7 GeV/cm^2/s/sr around 30 TeV. We show that, if sources of the TeV-PeV neutrinos are transparent to gamma rays with respect to two-photon annihilation, strong tensions with the isotropic diffuse gamma-ray background measured by Fermi are unavoidable, independently of the production mechanism. We further show that, if the IceCube neutrinos have a photohadronic (pgamma) origin, the sources are expected to be opaque to 1-100 GeV gamma rays. With these general multimessenger arguments, we find that the …
We propose to search for the neutrino radiative decay by fitting a photon energy spectrum of the cosmic infrared background to a sum of the photon energy spectrum from the neutrino radiative decay and a continuum. By comparing the present cosmic infrared background energy spectrum observed by AKARI and Spitzer to the photon energy spectrum expected from neutrino radiative decay with a maximum likelihood method, we obatined a lifetime lower limit of $3.1 \times 10^{12}$ to $3.8 \times 10^{12}$ years at 95% confidence level for the third generation neutrino $ν_3$ in the $ν_3$ mass range between …
We explore the potential of measurements of cosmological effects, such as neutrino spectral distortions from the neutrino decoupling and neutrino clustering in our Galaxy, via cosmic neutrino capture on tritium. We compute the precise capture rates of each neutrino species including such cosmological effects to probe them. These precise estimates of capture rates are also important in that the would-be deviation of the estimated capture rate could suggest new neutrino physics and/or a non-standard evolution of the universe. In addition, we discuss the precise differences between the capture ra…
We point out that the Pauli blocking of neutrinos by cosmological relic neutrinos can be a significant effect. For zero-energy neutrinos, the standard parameters for the neutrino background temperature and density give a suppression of approximately 1/2. We show the effect this has on three-body beta decays. The size of the effect is of the same order as the recently suggested neutrino capture on beta-decaying nuclei.
The IceCube experiment recently detected the first flux of high-energy neutrinos in excess of atmospheric backgrounds. We examine whether these neutrinos originate from within the same extragalactic sources as ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Starting from rather general assumptions about spectra and flavors, we find that producing a neutrino flux at the requisite level through pion photoproduction leads to a flux of protons well below the cosmic-ray data at ~10^18 eV, where the composition is light, unless pions/muons cool before decaying. This suggests a dominant class of accelerator that allow…
Motivated by the recent IceCube result, we study high energy cosmic-ray neutrino flux from the decay of a long-lived particle. Because neutrinos are so transparent, high energy neutrinos produced in the past may also contribute to the present neutrino flux. We point out that the PeV neutrino events observed by IceCube may originate in the decay of a particle much heavier than PeV if its lifetime is shorter than the present cosmic time. It is shown that the mass of the particle responsible for the IceCube event can be as large as $\sim 10^{10}\ {\rm GeV}$. We also discuss several possibilities …
We investigate the possibility that particles that are long-lived on cosmological scales, making up part or all of the dark matter, decay to neutrinos that have present-day energies around an eV. The neutrinos from these decays can potentially be visible at experiments that hope to directly observe the cosmic neutrino background through neutrino capture on tritium, such as PTOLEMY. In the context of a simple model that can realize such decays, we discuss the allowed signatures at a PTOLEMY-like experiment given current cosmological constraints.
Current cosmological data drop an interesting hint about the existence of sub-eV sterile neutrinos, which should be a part of the cosmic neutrino background (C$ν$B). We point out that such light sterile neutrinos may leave a distinct imprint on the electron energy spectrum in the capture of relic electron neutrinos by means of radioactive beta-decaying nuclei. We examine possible signals of sterile neutrinos relative to active neutrinos, characterized by their masses and sensitive to their number densities, in the reaction $ν^{}_e + ~^3{\rm H} \to ~^3{\rm He} + e^-$ against the corresponding t…
In this essay we extend the standard discussion of neutrino oscillations to astrophysical neutrinos propagating through expanding space. This extension introduces a new cosmological parameter $I$ into the oscillation phase. The new parameter records cosmic history in much the same manner as the redshift z or the apparent luminosity D_L. Measuring $I$ through neutrino oscillations could help determine cosmological parameters and discriminate among different cosmologies.
The primordial anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background are linearly polarized via Compton-scattering. On the other hand, a primordial degree of circular polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background is not observationally excluded. In this work, we discuss the generation of the circular polarization of CMB via their scattering on the cosmic neutrino background since the epoch of recombination. We show that photon-neutrino interaction can transform plane polarization into circular polarization through processes $γ+ν\rightarrowγ+ν$ and the Stokes-V parameter of CMB has linear dependenc…
Neutrinos might interact among themselves through forces that have so far remained hidden. Throughout the history of the Universe, such \emph{secret} interactions could lead to scatterings between the neutrinos from supernova explosions and the non-relativistic relic neutrinos left over from the Big Bang. Such scatterings can boost the cosmic neutrino background (C$ν$B) to energies of ${\cal O}$(MeV), making it, in principle, observable in experiments searching for the diffuse supernova neutrino background. Assuming a model-independent, but flavor universal, four-Fermi interaction, we determin…
High-energy cosmic neutrinos can reveal new fundamental particles and interactions, probing energy and distance scales far exceeding those accessible in the laboratory. This white paper describes the outstanding particle physics questions that high-energy cosmic neutrinos can address in the coming decade. A companion white paper discusses how the observation of cosmic neutrinos can address open questions in astrophysics. Tests of fundamental physics using high-energy cosmic neutrinos will be enabled by detailed measurements of their energy spectrum, arrival directions, flavor composition, and …
The Cosmic Neutrino Background is within Reach of Future Neutrino Telescopes
Massachusetts Institute of Technology(麻省理工学院);Harvard University(哈佛大学);Virginia Tech(弗吉尼亚理工大学);Institute of Science Tokyo(东京科学大学);The University of Tokyo(东京大学)
We study massive particle radiation from cosmic string kinks, and its observability in extremely high energy neutrinos. In particular, we consider the emission of moduli --- weakly coupled scalar particles predicted in supersymmetric theories --- from the kinks of cosmic string loops. Since kinks move at the speed of light on strings, moduli are emitted with large Lorentz factors, and eventually decay into many pions and neutrinos via hadronic cascades. The produced neutrino flux has energy $E \gtrsim 10^{11} \rm{GeV}$, and is affected by oscillations and absorption (resonant and non-resonant)…
Neutrino capture on tritium has emerged as a promising method for detecting the cosmic neutrino background (CvB). We show that relic neutrinos are captured most readily when their spin vectors are anti-aligned with the polarization axis of the tritium nuclei and when they approach along the direction of polarization. As a result, CvB observatories may measure anisotropies in the cosmic neutrino velocity and spin distributions by polarizing the tritium targets. A small dipole anisotropy in the CvB is expected due to the peculiar velocity of the lab frame with respect to the cosmic frame and due…
Calculations of the cosmic rate of core collapses, and the associated neutrino flux, commonly assume that a fixed fraction of massive stars collapse to black holes. We argue that recent results suggest that this fraction instead increases with redshift. With relatively more stars vanishing as "unnovae" in the distant universe, the detectability of the cosmic MeV neutrino background is improved due to their hotter neutrino spectrum, and expectations for supernova surveys are reduced. We conclude that neutrino detectors, after the flux from normal SNe is isolated via either improved modeling or …
Multiple astrophysical probes of the cosmic star formation history yield widely different inferences of this rate at redshifts z > 1. While all probes seem to indicate a period of peak star formation known as the cosmic noon between 1.5 < z < 3, the detailed inferences from these probes are in disagreement. In particular, the magnitude of the peak star formation rate density indicated by H-alpha data is higher by a factor of ~ 4 compared to the magnitude of the peak indicated by UV/IR data. In this work, we explore the potential of future measurements of the diffuse supernova neutrino backgrou…