Finite temperature radiative corrections to neutron decay and related processes

Cambier, Jean-Luc; Primack, Joel R.; Sher, Marc

doi:10.1016/0550-3213(82)90262-0

Cited by 66 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Early work [1][2][3][4] considered the neutrinos to have a thermal distribution after weak decoupling and calculated the consequences of e ± annihilation on the temperature of this thermal distribution. The focus of Refs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The feedback between neutrino energy transport and plasma conditions is especially sensitive to electron-positron pair number density as these are key targets for neutrino scattering. Previous works [1,2,10,44] include the effects of finite temperature QED radiative corrections. The corrections have been calculated for the electron mass and wave function renormalization, the electron-photon vertex and infrared photon emission and absorption.…”

Section: Finite Temperature Qed Radiative Correctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a preview of Sec.V, the weak interaction terms involving neutrinos and free nucleons utilize the electron rest mass at its vacuum value and do not include the higher-order effects detailed in Refs. [1,2,10]. Our n ↔ p rates do not take into account the renormalization of the electron rest mass in any BBN computations.…”

Section: Finite Temperature Qed Radiative Correctionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(1) or (2) for the weak-interaction processes of interest is numerically intensive. However, the required integrations (described in detail in Sec.II B 3 and Appendices B and C) are performed in parallel with the code burst (BBN/Unitary/Recombination/Selfconsistent/Transport) in Fortran 90/95 under openmpi.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The work we describe here builds on the many previous studies of the evolution of the neutrino energy distribution functions in the early universe (see Refs. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and Appendix A). Higher precision in theoretical calculations of neutrino transport and nucleosynthesis in the early universe is warranted by recent and anticipated improvement in the precision of cosmological observations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neutrino energy transport in weak decoupling and big bang nucleosynthesis

et al. 2016

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We calculate the evolution of the early universe through the epochs of weak decoupling, weak freeze-out and big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) by simultaneously coupling a full strong, electromagnetic, and weak nuclear reaction network with a multi-energy group Boltzmann neutrino energy transport scheme. The modular structure of our code provides the ability to dissect the relative contributions of each process responsible for evolving the dynamics of the early universe in the absence of neutrino flavor oscillations. Such an approach allows a detailed accounting of the evolution of the νe,νe, νµ,νµ, ντ ,ντ energy distribution functions alongside and self-consistently with the nuclear reactions and entropy/heat generation and flow between the neutrino and photon/electron/positron/baryon plasma components. This calculation reveals nonlinear feedback in the time evolution of neutrino distribution functions and plasma thermodynamic conditions (e.g., electron-positron pair densities), with implications for: the phasing between scale factor and plasma temperature; the neutron-to-proton ratio; light-element abundance histories; and the cosmological parameter N eff . We find that our approach of following the time development of neutrino spectral distortions and concomitant entropy production and extraction from the plasma results in changes in the computed value of the BBN deuterium yield. For example, for particular implementations of quantum corrections in plasma thermodynamics, our calculations show a 0.4% increase in deuterium. These changes are potentially significant in the context of anticipated improvements in obversational and nuclear physics uncertainties.PACS numbers: 95.85.Ry,14.60.Lm,26.35.+c,98.70.Vc

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%