scholarly journals Precise capture rates of cosmic neutrinos and their implications on cosmology

2021 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kensuke Akita ◽  
Saul Hurwitz ◽  
Masahide Yamaguchi

AbstractWe 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 rates of Dirac and Majorana neutrinos for each species, the required energy resolutions to detect each neutrino species and the method of reconstruction of the spectrum of cosmic neutrinos via the spectrum of emitted electrons, with emphasis on the PTOLEMY experiment.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Frederik Depta ◽  
Andreas Halsch ◽  
Janine Hütig ◽  
Sebastian Mendizabal ◽  
Owe Philipsen

Abstract Thermal leptogenesis, in the framework of the standard model with three additional heavy Majorana neutrinos, provides an attractive scenario to explain the observed baryon asymmetry in the universe. It is based on the out-of-equilibrium decay of Majorana neutrinos in a thermal bath of standard model particles, which in a fully quantum field theoretical formalism is obtained by solving Kadanoff-Baym equations. So far, the leading two-loop contributions from leptons and Higgs particles are included, but not yet gauge corrections. These enter at three-loop level but, in certain kinematical regimes, require a resummation to infinite loop order for a result to leading order in the gauge coupling. In this work, we apply such a resummation to the calculation of the lepton number density. The full result for the simplest “vanilla leptogenesis” scenario is by $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (1) increased compared to that of quantum Boltzmann equations, and for the first time permits an estimate of all theoretical uncertainties. This step completes the quantum theory of leptogenesis and forms the basis for quantitative evaluations, as well as extensions to other scenarios.


2004 ◽  
Vol 19 (03) ◽  
pp. 317-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA M. STAŚTO

Ultrahigh energy neutrinos can provide important information about the distant astronomical objects and the origin of the Universe. Precise knowledge about neutrino interactions and production rates is essential for estimating background, expected fluxes and detection probabilities. In this paper we review the applications of the high energy QCD to the calculations of the interaction cross-sections of the neutrinos. We also study the production of the ultrahigh energy neutrinos in the atmosphere due to the charm and beauty decays.


Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (60) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
William Lyons

The author sets out to respond to the student complaint that ‘Philosophy did not answer “the big questions”’, in particular the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ The response first outlines and evaluates the most common religious answer, that human life is given a meaning by God who created us and informs us that this life is just the pilgrim way to the next eternal life in heaven. He then discusses the response that, from the point of view of post-Darwinian science and the evolution of the universe and all that is in it, human life on Earth must be afforded no more meaning than the meaning we would give to a microscopic planaria or to some creature on another planet in a distant universe. All things including human creatures on Planet Earth just exist for a time and that is that. There is no plan or purpose. In the last sections the author outlines the view that it is we humans ourselves who give meaning to our lives by our choices of values or things that are worth pursuing and through our resulting sense of achievement or the opposite. Nevertheless the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ can mean quite different things in different contexts, and so merit different if related answers. From one point of view one answer may lie in terms of the love of one human for another.


2021 ◽  
pp. 2150111
Author(s):  
Fei-Quan Tu ◽  
Bin Sun ◽  
Meng Wan ◽  
Qi-Hong Huang

Entropy is a key concept widely used in physics and other fields. At the same time, the meaning of entropy with different names and the relationship among them are confusing. In this paper, we discuss the relationship among the Clausius entropy, Boltzmann entropy and information entropy and further show that the three kinds of entropy are equivalent to each other to some extent. Moreover, we point out that the evolution of the universe is a process of entropy increment and life originates from the original low entropy of the universe. Finally, we discuss the evolution of the entire universe composed of the cosmological horizon and the space surrounded by it and interpret the entropy as a measure of information of all microstates corresponding to a certain macrostate. Under this explanation, the thermodynamic entropy and information entropy are unified and we can conclude that the sum of the entropy of horizon and the entropy of matter in the space surrounded by the horizon does not decrease with time if the second law of thermodynamics holds for the entire universe.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Aleksander Stachowski ◽  
Marek Szydłowski ◽  
Krzysztof Urbanowski

We consider a cosmology with decaying metastable dark energy and assume that a decay process of this metastable dark energy is a quantum decay process. Such an assumption implies among others that the evolution of the Universe is irreversible and violates the time reversal symmetry. We show that if we replace the cosmological time t appearing in the equation describing the evolution of the Universe by the Hubble cosmological scale time, then we obtain time dependent Λ(t) in the form of the series of even powers of the Hubble parameter H: Λ(t)=Λ(H). Our special attention is focused on radioactive-like exponential form of the decay process of the dark energy and on the consequences of this type decay.


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