Cosmic neutrino decoupling and its observable imprints: insights from entropic-dual transport

Abstract Very different processes characterize the decoupling of neutrinos to form the cosmic neutrino background (C ν B) and the much later decoupling of photons from thermal equilibrium to form the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The C ν B emerges from the fuzzy, energy-dependent neutrinosphere and encodes the physics operating in the early universe in the temperature range T ∼ 10 MeV to T ∼ 10 keV. This is the epoch where beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics, especially in the neutrino sector, may be influential in setting the light element abundances, the necessarily distorted fossil neutrino energy spectra, and other light particle energy density contributions. Here we use techniques honed in extensive CMB studies to analyze the C ν B as calculated in detailed neutrino energy transport and nuclear reaction simulations of the protracted weak decoupling and primordial nucleosynthesis epochs. Our moment method, relative entropy, and differential visibility approach can leverage future high precision CMB and light element primordial abundance measurements to provide new insights into the C ν B and any BSM physics it encodes. We demonstrate that the evolution of the energy spectrum of the C ν B throughout the weak decoupling epoch is accurately captured in the Standard Model by only three parameters per species, a non-trivial conclusion given the deviation from thermal equilibrium and the impact of the decrease of electron-positron pairs. Furthermore, we can interpret each of the three parameters as physical characteristics of a non-equilibrium system. Though the treatment presented here makes some simplifying assumptions including ignoring neutrino flavor oscillations, the success of our compact description within the Standard Model motivates its use also in BSM scenarios. We further demonstrate how observations of primordial light element abundances can be used to place constraints on the C ν B energy spectrum, deriving response functions that can be applied for general deviations from a thermal spectrum. Combined with the description of those deviations that we develop here, our methods provide a convenient and powerful framework to constrain the impact of BSM physics on the C ν B.