Cosmological implications of neutrinos

Subir Sarkar

Published 1997-10-07, updated 1997-10-13Version 2

Massive neutrinos were the first proposed, and remain the most natural, particle candidate for the dark matter. In the absence of firm laboratory evidence for neutrino mass, considerations of the formation of large scale structure in the universe provide a sensitive, albeit indirect, probe of this possibility. Observations of galaxy clustering and large angle anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background have been interpreted as requiring that neutrinos provide about 20% of the critical density. However the need for such `hot' dark matter is removed if the primordial spectrum of density fluctuations is tilted below scale-invariance, as is often the case in physically realistic inflationary models. This question will be resolved by forthcoming precision measurements of microwave background anisotropy on small angular scales. This data will also improve the nucleosynthesis bound on the number of neutrino species and test whether decays of relic neutrinos could have ionized the intergalactic medium.