Constraining neutrino physics with BBN and CMBR

S. H. Hansen, G. Mangano, A. Melchiorri, G. Miele, O. Pisanti

Published 2001-05-22, updated 2001-06-04Version 2

We perform a likelihood analysis of the recent results on the anisotropy of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation from the BOOMERanG and DASI experiments to show that they single out an effective number of neutrinos in good agreement with standard Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We also consider degenerate Big Bang Nucleosynthesis to provide new bounds on effective relativistic degrees of freedom $N_\nu$ and, in particular, on neutrino chemical potential $\xi_\alpha$. When including Supernova Ia data we find, at $2\sigma$, $N_\nu \leq 7$ and $-0.01 \leq \xi_e \leq 0.22$, $|\xi_{\mu,\tau}|\leq 2.6$.