Quasi-N-body simulations, such as FastPM, provide a fast way to simulate cosmological structure formation, but have yet to adequately include the effects of massive neutrinos. We present a method to include neutrino particles in FastPM, enabling computation of the CDM and total matter power spectra to percent-level accuracy in the non-linear regime. The CDM-neutrino cross-power can also be computed at a sufficient accuracy to constrain cosmological observables. To avoid the shot noise that typically plagues neutrino particle simulations, we employ a quasi-random algorithm to sample the relevant Fermi-Dirac distribution when setting the initial neutrino thermal velocities. We additionally develop an effective distribution function to describe a set of non-degenerate neutrinos as a single particle to speed up non-degenerate simulations. The simulation is accurate for the full range of physical interest, $M_ν\lesssim 0.6$eV, and applicable to redshifts $z\lesssim2$. Such accuracy can be achieved by initializing particles with the two-fluid approximation transfer functions (using the REPS package). Convergence can be reached in $\sim 25$ steps, with a starting redshift of $z=99$. Probing progressively smaller scales only requires an increase in the number of CDM particles being simulated, while the number of neutrino particles can remain fixed at a value less than or similar to the number of CDM particles. In turn, the percentage increase in runtime-per-step due to neutrino particles is between $\sim 5-20\%$ for runs with $1024^3$ CDM particles, and decreases as the number of CDM particles is increased. The code has been made publicly available, providing an invaluable resource to produce fast predictions for cosmological surveys and studying reconstruction.
Hydrodynamic cosmological simulations at present usually employ either the Lagrangian SPH technique, or Eulerian hydrodynamics on a Cartesian mesh with adaptive mesh refinement. Both of these methods have disadvantages that negatively impact their accuracy in certain situations. We here propose a novel scheme which largely eliminates these weaknesses. It is based on a moving unstructured mesh defined by the Voronoi tessellation of a set of discrete points. The mesh is used to solve the hyperbolic conservation laws of ideal hydrodynamics with a finite volume approach, based on a second-order un…
The constraints on total neutrino mass and effective number of neutrino species based on CMB anisotropy power spectrum, Hubble constant, baryon acoustic oscillations and galaxy cluster mass function data are presented. It is shown that the discrepancies between various cosmological data in Hubble constant and density fluctuation amplitude, measured in standard LCDM cosmological model, can be eliminated if more than standard effective number of neutrino species and non-zero total neutrino mass are considered. This extension of LCDM model appears to be \approx 3 σ significant when all cosmologic…
The paper by Sato and Kobayashi in 1977 studied the cosmological effects of a massive neutrino and obtained constraints on its properties. This paper initiated many studies to use cosmology as a laboratory of particle physics or to use particle physics to explore the very early universe.
Cosmological shocks are a critical part of large-scale structure formation, and are responsible for heating the intracluster medium in galaxy clusters. In addition, they are also capable of accelerating non-thermal electrons and protons. In this work, we focus on the acceleration of electrons at shock fronts, which is thought to be responsible for radio relics - extended radio features in the vicinity of merging galaxy clusters. By combining high resolution AMR/N-body cosmological simulations with an accurate shock finding algorithm and a model for electron acceleration, we calculate the expec…
Light but massive cosmological neutrinos do not cluster significantly on small scales, due to their high thermal velocities. With finite masses, cosmological neutrinos become part of the total matter field and contribute to its smoothing. Structure formation in the presence of massive neutrinos is therefore impeded compared to that in the standard $Λ$CDM cosmology with massless neutrinos. Neutrinos' masses also distort the anisotropy power spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB). Furthermore, a finite chemical potential $μ$ for cosmological neutrinos, still allowed by current data, would…
The formation of the large-scale structure, the evolution and distribution of galaxies, quasars, and dark matter on cosmological scales, requires numerical simulations. Differentiable simulations provide gradients of the cosmological parameters, that can accelerate the extraction of physical information from statistical analyses of observational data. The deep learning revolution has brought not only myriad powerful neural networks, but also breakthroughs including automatic differentiation (AD) tools and computational accelerators like GPUs, facilitating forward modeling of the Universe with …
We show how Newtonian cosmological simulations can be employed to investigate the non-linear evolution of two particle species in a relativistic context. We discuss the application for massive neutrinos and other multi-species systems such as Cold Dark Matter (CDM) plus baryons or Warm Dark Matter (WDM). We propose a method that allows us to perform simulations including massive neutrinos and general relativistic effects at almost the same computational cost as ordinary CDM only N-body simulations, employing tailor-made initial conditions and a dictionary for the interpretation of the simulati…
It has been suggested that recent cosmological and flavor-oscillation data favor the existence of additional neutrino species beyond the three predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. We apply Bayesian model selection to determine whether there is indeed any evidence from current cosmological datasets for the standard cosmological model to be extended to include additional neutrino flavors. The datasets employed include cosmic microwave background temperature, polarization and lensing power spectra, and measurements of the baryon acoustic oscillation scale and the Hubble constant. …
In this article we continue to test cosmological models centred on Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) with light sterile neutrinos, which could in principle be a way to solve the fine-tuning problems of the standard model on galaxy scales while preserving successful predictions on larger scales. Due to previous failures of the simple MOND cosmological model, here we test a speculative model where the modified gravitational field is produced only by the baryons and the sterile neutrinos produce a purely Newtonian field (hence Modified Baryonic Dynamics). We use two component cosmological simula…
We present the results of cosmological simulations of large-scale structure formation with massive neutrinos. The phase-space distribution of the cosmic relic neutrinos is followed, for the first time, by directly integrating the six-dimensional Vlasov-Poisson equations. Our novel approach allows us to represent free streaming and clustering of neutrinos, and their gravitational interaction with cold dark matter accurately. We thus obtain solutions for the collisionless dynamics independent of conventional N-body methods. We perform a suite of hybrid N-body/Vlasov simulations with varying the …
We use Bayesian model comparison to determine whether extensions to Standard-Model neutrino physics -- primarily additional effective numbers of neutrinos and/or massive neutrinos -- are merited by the latest cosmological data. Given the significant advances in cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations represented by the Planck data, we examine whether Planck temperature and CMB lensing data, in combination with lower redshift data, have strengthened (or weakened) the previous findings. We conclude that the state-of-the-art cosmological data do not show evidence for deviations from the st…
Dark energy perturbations and the robustness of cosmological neutrino-mass constraints
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；CAS Key Laboratory for Research in Galaxies and Cosmology, School of Astronomy and Space Science, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学院星系与宇宙学重点实验室，中国科学技术大学天文与空间科学学院）；National Observatory of Athens（雅典国家天文台）；Universidad Católica del Norte（北天主教大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
Cosmological shock waves play an important role in hierarchical structure formation by dissipating and thermalizing kinetic energy of gas flows, thereby heating the universe. Furthermore, identifying shocks in hydrodynamical simulations and measuring their Mach number accurately is critical for calculating the production of non-thermal particle components through diffusive shock acceleration. However, shocks are often significantly broadened in numerical simulations, making it challenging to implement an accurate shock finder. We here introduce a refined methodology for detecting shocks in the…
In the standard $Λ$CDM model, neutrinos are treated as radiation, with their masses and possible degeneracy ignored. In this paper, we compute the impact of a finite relic neutrino degeneracy $ξ$ on the CMB angular power spectra, and obtain constraints on $ξ$ using current cosmological data sets. We find that $ξ\approx O(1)$ is still allowed. We also study the correlations between $ξ$, the Hubble parameter $H_0$, and the spectral index $n_s$. Due to these correlations, the CMB constraints on inflation models are loosened when $ξ$ is fitted together with other cosmological parameters, such that…
We present a halo mass function accurate over the full relevant Hu-Sawicki $f(R)$ parameter space based on spherical collapse calculations and calibrated to a suite of modified gravity $N$-body simulations that include massive neutrinos. We investigate the ability of current and forthcoming galaxy cluster observations to detect deviations from general relativity while constraining the total neutrino mass and including systematic uncertainties. Our results indicate that the degeneracy between massive neutrino and modify gravity effects is a limiting factor for the current searches for new gravi…
Neutrinos are one of the major puzzles in modern physics. Despite measurements of mass differences, the Standard Model of particle physics describes them as exactly massless. Additionally, recent measurements from both particle physics experiments and cosmology indicate the existence of more than the three Standard Model species. Here we review the cosmological evidence and its possible interpretations.
Cosmological observations are a powerful probe of neutrino properties, and in particular of their mass. In this review, we first discuss the role of neutrinos in shaping the cosmological evolution at both the background and perturbation level, and describe their effects on cosmological observables such as the cosmic microwave background and the distribution of matter at large scale. We then present the state of the art concerning the constraints on neutrino masses from those observables, and also review the prospects for future experiments. We also briefly discuss the prospects for determining…
Detecting the extremely low-energy neutrinos that form the Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) presents many experimental challenges, but pursuing this elusive goal is still worthwhile because these weakly-interacting particles could provide a new window into the structure and composition of the early universe. This report examines whether cosmological neutrinos can deposit sufficient energy into a target system to be detectable with plausible extensions of current bolometric technologies. While the macroscopic wavelengths of cosmological neutrinos can greatly enhance their cross sections with de…
Considering the gauge model SU(2)_L x U(1) with the extension of the lepton sector by right-handed sterile Majorana neutrinos, we distinguish a "minimal parametric mixing scenario" for a complete matrix of 6 x 6 light (active) and sterile neutrinos, which depends, in addition to experimentally measured physical parameters, only on the masses of sterile neutrinos. For such a scenario, improved cosmological bounds are provided, resulting from the lifetime of sterile neutrinos and the fraction of energy carried by sterile neutrino dark matter.
Sterile massive neutrinos are a natural extension of the Standard Model of elementary particles. The energy density of the extra sterile massive states affects cosmological measurements in an analogous way to that of active neutrino species. We perform here an analysis of current cosmological data and derive bounds on the masses of the active and the sterile neutrino states as well as on the number of sterile states. The so-called (3+2) models with three sub-eV active massive neutrinos plus two sub-eV massive sterile species is well within the 95% CL allowed regions when considering cosmologic…
We consider the phenomenological implications of the violation of the Pauli exclusion principle for neutrinos, focusing on cosmological observables such as the spectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and the primordial abundances of light elements. Neutrinos that behave (at least partly) as bosonic particles have a modified equilibrium distribution function that implies a different influence on the evolution of the Universe that, in the case of massive neutrinos, can not be simply parametrized by a change in the effective number of neutrinos. Our resu…
Both particle physics experiments and cosmological surveys can constrain the properties of sterile neutrinos, but do so with different parameterizations that naturally use different prior information. We present joint constraints on the 3$+$1 sterile neutrino model oscillation parameters, $Δm_{41}^2$ and $\sin^22θ$, with log priors on those parameters using mostly cosmological data from the Planck satellite. Two cases are considered, one where the sterile neutrino mixes with electron neutrinos solely, and another where the sterile neutrino mixes exclusively with muon neutrinos, allowing us to …
The standard model of particle physics is extended by adding a purely neutrinophilic dark sector. It is shown that theories which accommodate standard model neutrinos as dark radiation are resurrected. Sterile neutrinos bridge the visible and the dark sector and can keep their mutual interactions effective even after the epoch of big bang nucleosythesis. This prolonged contact between dark matter and standard model neutrinos solves the well-known small-scale structure problems of the cosmological standard model. The dark sector presented in this work satisfies all experimental and observationa…
The light neutrino masses are at present most stringently constraint via cosmological probes. In particular the Planck collaboration reports $ \sum m_ν\leq 0.12\,\mathrm{eV}$ at $95\%$ CL within the standard cosmological model. This is more than one order of magnitude stronger than the one arising from laboratory searches. The cosmological bound taken at face value excludes a plethora of neutrino flavour models which can successfully explain the neutrino oscillation data. The indirect nature of the cosmological bound, however, allows to relax the bound to up to $ \sum m_ν\sim 1\,\mathrm{eV}$ i…
In this paper the non-linear effect of massive neutrinos on cosmological structures is studied in a conceptually new way. We have solved the non-linear continuity and Euler equations for the neutrinos on a grid in real space in $N$-body simulations, and closed the Boltzmann hierarchy at the non-linear Euler equation using the stress and pressure perturbations from linear theory. By comparing with state-of-the art cosmological neutrino simulations, we are able to simulate the non-linear neutrino power spectrum very accurately. This translates into a negligible error in the matter power spectrum…
In this talk I will review the current status of the constraints on the neutrino properties from cosmological measurements, with a particular focus on their mass and effective number. I will also discuss the existing tensions within the context of the \lcdm\ model, including the discrepancies on the Hubble parameter and on the matter fluctuations at small scales, and how neutrinos could help to alleviate the aforementioned problems.
Non-standard interactions (NSI) between neutrinos and electrons can significantly modify the decoupling of neutrinos from the plasma. These interactions have two effects on the overall picture: (i) they alter neutrino oscillations though matter effects and (ii) they modify the scattering and annihilation processes involving neutrinos and electrons and positrons. We study the role of non-universal and flavour-changing NSI in the decoupling and how they impact the determination of the effective number of neutrinos, $N_{eff}$. We examine the degeneracies between NSI parameters and we compare the …
Four zero neutrino Yukawa textures in a specified weak basis, combined with $μτ$ symmetry and type-I seesaw, yield a highly constrained and predictive scheme. Two alternately viable $3\times3$ light neutrino Majorana mass matrices $m_{νA}/m_{νB}$ result with inverted/normal mass ordering. Neutrino masses, Majorana in character and predicted within definite ranges with laboratory and cosmological inputs, will have their sum probed cosmologically. The rate for $0νββ$ decay, though generally below the reach of planned experiments, could approach it in some parameter region. Departure from $μτ$ sy…
Cosmological and astrophysical measurements provide powerful constraints on neutrino masses complementary to those from accelerators and reactors. Here we provide a guide to these different probes, for each explaining its physical basis, underlying assumptions, current and future reach.
Neutrinos can play an important role in the evolution of the Universe, modifying some of the cosmological observables. In this contribution we summarize the main aspects of cosmological relic neutrinos and we describe how the precision of present cosmological data can be used to learn about neutrino properties, in particular their mass, providing complementary information to beta decay and neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments. We show how the analysis of current cosmological observations, such as the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background or the distribution of large-scale struc…
We study models in which neutrino masses are generated dynamically at cosmologically late times. Our study is purely phenomenological and parameterized in terms of three effective parameters characterizing the redshift of mass generation, the width of the transition region, and the present day neutrino mass. We also study the possibility that neutrinos become strongly self-interacting at the time where the mass is generated. We find that in a number of cases, models with large present day neutrino masses are allowed by current CMB, BAO and supernova data. The increase in the allowed mass range…
New physics in the neutrino sector might be necessary to address anomalies between different neutrino oscillation experiments. Intriguingly, it also offers a possible solution to the discrepant cosmological measurements of $H_0$ and $σ_8$. We show here that delaying the onset of neutrino free-streaming until close to the epoch of matter-radiation equality can naturally accommodate a larger value for the Hubble constant $H_0=72.3 \pm 1.4$ km/s/Mpc and a lower value of the matter fluctuations $σ_8=0.786\pm 0.020$, while not degrading the fit to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) damping tail.…
Recent time-of-flight measurements on muon neutrinos in the OPERA neutrino oscillation experiment have found anomalously short times compared to the light travel-times, corresponding to a superluminal velocity, $v-1=2.37\pm0.32\times 10^{-5}$ in units where $c=1$. We show that cosmological bounds rule out an explanation involving a Lorentz invariant tachyonic neutrino. At the OPERA energy scale, nucleosynthesis constraints imply $v-1<0.86\times 10^{-12}$ and the Cosmic Microwave Background observations imply $v-1<7.1\times 10^{-23}$. The CMB limit on the velocity of a tachyon with an energy of…
We study the impact of non-standard momentum distributions of cosmic neutrinos on the anisotropy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and the matter power spectrum of the large scale structure. We show that the neutrino distribution has almost no unique observable imprint, as it is almost entirely degenerate with the effective number of neutrino flavours, $N_{\mathrm{eff}}$, and the neutrino mass, $m_ν$. Performing a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis with current cosmological data, we demonstrate that the neutrino mass bound heavily depends on the assumed momentum distribution of relic …
It has been suggested that both recent cosmological data and the results of flavor oscillation experiments (MiniBooNE and LSND) lend support to the existence of low-mass sterile neutrinos. The cosmological data appear to weakly favor additional forms of radiation in the Universe, beyond photons and three standard neutrino families. We reconsider the cosmological evidence by making the resulting confidence intervals on the additional effective neutrino species as prior-independent as possible. We find that, once the prior-dependence is removed, the latest cosmological data show no evidence for …
Neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI) with electrons are known to alter the picture of neutrino decoupling from the cosmic plasma. NSI modify both flavour oscillations through matter effects, and the annihilation and scattering between neutrinos and electrons and positrons in the thermal plasma. In view of the forthcoming cosmological observations, we perform a precision study of the impact of non-universal and flavour-changing NSI on the effective number of neutrinos, $N_{eff}$. We present the variation of $N_{eff}$ arising from the different NSI parameters and discuss the existing degener…
We present a new method to measure neutrino masses using the dark matter-neutrino relative velocity. The relative motion between dark matter and neutrinos results in a parity-odd bispectrum which can be measured from cross-correlation of different cosmic fields. This new method is not affected by most systematics which are parity even and not limited by the knowledge of optical depth to the cosmic microwave background. We estimate the detectability of the relative velocity effect and find that the minimal sum of neutrino masses could be detected at high significance with upcoming surveys.
We study experimental and cosmological constraints on the extension of the Standard Model by three right handed neutrinos with masses between those of the pion and W boson. We combine for the first time direct, indirect and cosmological constraints in this mass range. This includes experimental constraints from neutrino oscillation data, neutrinoless double $β$ decay, electroweak precision data, lepton universality, searches for rare lepton decays, tests of CKM unitarity and past direct searches at colliders or fixed target experiments. On the cosmological side, big bang nucleosynthesis has th…
We propose a ultraviolet complete theory for cold dark matter(CDM) and sterile neutrino that can accommodate both cosmological data and neutrino oscillation experiments at $1σ$ level. A new $U(1)_X$ dark gauge symmetry is introduced, and is assumed to be broken at $\sim \mathcal{O}$(MeV) scale. Such a light mediator for DM's self-scattering and scattering-off sterile neutrinos can resolve three controversies for cold DM on small cosmological scales, cusp vs. core, too-big-to-fail and missing satellites problems. We can also accommodate $\sim$ eV scale sterile neutrinos as the hot dark matter(H…
Although cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the most powerful cosmological probe of neutrino masses, it is in trouble with local direct measurements of $H_0$, which is called the $H_0$ tension. Since neutrino masses are correlated with $H_0$ in CMB, one can expect the cosmological bound on neutrino masses would be much affected by the $H_0$ tension. We investigate what impact this tension brings to cosmological bound on neutrino masses by assuming a model with modified recombination which has been shown to resolve the tension. We argue that constraints on neutrino masses become significantly…
We propose a new parameterization to measure the neutrino mass hierarchy, namely $Δ=(m_3-m_1)/(m_1+m_3)$ which is dimensionless and varies in the range $[-1,1]$. Taking into account the results of neutrino oscillation experiments, $Δ$ is the unique parameter for determining all the masses of neutrinos, and a positive (negative) sign of $Δ$ denotes the normal (inverted) mass hierarchy. Adopting the currently available cosmic observations, we find that the normal mass hierarchy is slightly favored, and the mass of lightest neutrino is less than $0.030$ eV for the normal mass hierarchy and $0.024…
We propose that gravitational interactions of cosmic neutrinos with the statistically homogeneous and isotropic fluctuations of space-time leads to decoherence. This working hypothesis, which we describe by means of a Lindblad operator, is applied to the system of two- and three-flavour neutrinos undergoing vacuum oscillations and the consequences are investigated. As result of this decoherence we find that the neutrino entropy would increase as a function of initial spectral distortions, mixing angles and CP-violation phase. Subsequently we discuss the chances to discover such an increase obs…
Secret interactions among sterile neutrinos have been recently proposed as an escape-route to reconcile eV sterile neutrino hints from short-baseline anomalies with cosmological observations. In particular models with coupling g_X \gtrsim 10^{-2} and gauge boson mediators $X$ with $M_X \lesssim 10$ MeV lead to large matter potential suppressing the sterile neutrino production before the neutrino decoupling. With this choice of parameter ranges, big bang nucleosynthesis is left unchanged and gives no bound on the model. However, we show that at lower temperatures when active-sterile oscillation…
In this paper we investigate a time-varying neutrino mass model, motivated by the mild tension between cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements of the matter fluctuations and those obtained from low-redshift data. We modify the minimal case of the model proposed by Dvali and Funcke (2016) that predicts late neutrino mass generation in a post-recombination cosmic phase transition, by assuming that neutrino asymmetries allow for the presence of relic neutrinos in the late-time Universe. We show that, if the transition is supercooled, current cosmological data (including CMB temperature, po…
A massive particle decaying into neutrinos in the early Universe is known to be less constrained than if it was decaying into other standard model particles. However, even if the decay proceeds into neutrinos, the latter still inevitably emit secondary particles undergoing electromagnetic interactions that can be probed. We analyse in details how sensitive various cosmological probes are to such secondary particles, namely CMB anisotropies, CMB spectral distortions, and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. For relics whose lifetime is shorter than the age of the Universe, this leads to original and strin…
We investigate how sterile neutrinos with a range of masses influence cosmology in MeV-scale reheating temperature scenarios. By computing the production of sterile neutrinos through the combination of mixing and scattering in the early Universe, we find that light sterile neutrinos, with masses and mixings as inferred from short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, are consistent with big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation for the reheating temperature of ${\cal O}(1)$ MeV if the parent particle responsible for reheating decays into electromagneti…
Constraining neutrino mass remains an elusive challenge in modern physics. Precision measurements are expected from several upcoming cosmological probes of large-scale structure. Achieving this goal relies on an equal level of precision from theoretical predictions of neutrino clustering. Numerical simulations of the non-linear evolution of cold dark matter and neutrinos play a pivotal role in this process. We incorporate neutrinos into the cosmological N-body code CUBEP3M and discuss the challenges associated with pushing to the extreme scales demanded by the neutrino problem. We highlight co…
There are hints, both from cosmology and from neutrino oscillation experiments, that one or two sterile neutrinos with eV masses are favored. We consider the implications of combining data from short baseline neutrino experiments with cosmological observations. In particular we consider cosmological models where the equation of state of dark energy and the curvature are allowed to vary. We find that the consistency of results from short baseline experiments and cosmology is dependent on the cosmological data sets that are used. When the two are consistent, we find that the inclusion of informa…
We investigate observable cosmological aspects of sterile neutrino dark matter produced via the freeze-in mechanism. The study is performed in a framework that admits many cosmologically interesting variations: high temperature production via annihilation processes from higher dimensional operators or low temperature production from decays of a scalar, with the decaying scalar in or out of equilibrium with the thermal bath, in supersymmetric or non-supersymmetric setups, thus allowing us to both extract generic properties and highlight features unique to particular variations. We find that whi…
In light of the improved sensitivities of cosmological observations, we examine the status of quasi-degenerate neutrino mass scenarios. Within the simplest extension of the standard cosmological model with massive neutrinos, we find that quasi-degenerate neutrinos are severely constrained by present cosmological data and neutrino oscillation experiments. % % We find that Planck 2018 observations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies disfavour quasi-degenerate neutrino masses at $2.4$ Gaussian $σ$'s, while adding Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) data brings the rejection to 5.9$σ$…
Cosmological constraints on the sum of neutrino masses and on the effective number of neutrino species in standard and non-standard scenarios are computed using the most recent available cosmological data. Our cosmological data sets include the measurement of the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) feature in the Data Release 9 CMASS sample of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). We study in detail the different degeneracies among the parameters, as well as the impact of the different data sets used in the analyses. When considering bounds on the sum of the three active neutrino…
Within the context of hot big-bang cosmology, a cosmic background of presently low energy neutrinos is predicted to exist in concert with the photons of the cosmic background radiation. The number density of the cosmological neutrinos is of the same order as that of the photons of the cosmic background radiation. That makes neutrinos the second most abundant particle species in the universe. In the early universe, when these neutrinos were highly relativistic, their effects in determining the ultimate structure and evolution of the universe were significant.
We introduce a cosmological invisible decay of the sterile neutrino with the eV-scale mass indicated by short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments in order to allow its full thermalization in the early Universe. We show that the fit of the cosmological data is practically as good as the fit obtained with a stable sterile neutrino without mass constraints, which has been recently considered by several authors for the explanation of the observed suppression of small-scale matter density fluctuations and for a solution of the tension between the Planck and BICEP2 measurements of the tensor t…
We report the result of a search for sterile neutrinos with the latest cosmological observations. Both cases of massless and massive sterile neutrinos are considered in the $Λ$CDM cosmology. The cosmological observations used in this work include the Planck 2015 temperature and polarization data, the baryon acoustic oscillation data, the Hubble constant direct measurement data, the Planck Sunyaev-Zeldovich cluster counts data, the Planck lensing data, and the cosmic shear data. We find that the current observational data give a hint of the existence of massless sterile neutrino (as dark radiat…
The next generation of cosmological surveys are expected to measure a non-zero sum of neutrino masses, even down to the minimum value of 58 meV inferred from neutrino flavor oscillation. The implications of such a measurement for the physics of neutrinos have been well documented; in contrast, the cosmological implications of such a measurement have received less attention. In this paper, we explore the impact of a neutrino mass detection consistent with $\sum m_ν= 58$ meV for our understanding of the history and contents of the universe. We focus primarily on three key areas: the thermal hist…
We study cosmological scenarios in which high-energy neutrinos are emitted from the decay of long-lived massive particles at the cosmic time later than a redshift of 10^6. The high-energy neutrino events recently observed by the IceCube experiment suggest a new source of high-energy cosmic-ray neutrinos; decay of a heavy particle can be one of the possibilities. We calculate the spectrum of the high-energy neutrinos emitted from the decay of long-lived particles, taking account of the neutrino scattering processes with background neutrinos. Then, we derive bounds on the scenario using the obse…
It is generally expected that adding light sterile species would increase the effective number of neutrinos, $N_{eff}$. In this paper we discuss a scenario that $N_{eff}$ can actually decrease due to the neutrino oscillation effect if sterile neutrinos have self-interactions. We specifically focus on the eV mass range, as suggested by the neutrino anomalies. With large self-interactions, sterile neutrinos are not fully thermalized in the early Universe because of the suppressed effective mixing angle or matter effect. As the Universe cools down, flavor equilibrium between active and sterile sp…
