Cosmic neutrino background

The cosmic neutrino background (CNB or CνB) is the universe's background particle radiation composed of neutrinos. They are sometimes known as relic neutrinos. The CνB is a relic of the Big Bang; while the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) dates from when the universe was 379,000 years old, the CνB decoupled (separated) from matter when the universe was just one second old. It is estimated that today, the CνB has a temperature of roughly 1.95K. As neutrinos rarely interact with matter, these neutrinos still exist today. They have a very low energy, around 10^−4 to 10^−6 eV. Even high energy neutrinos are notoriously difficult to detect, and the CνB has energies around 1010 times smaller, so the CνB may not be directly observed in detail for many years, if at all. However, Big Bang cosmology makes many predictions about the CνB, and there is very strong indirect evidence that the CνB exists. Given the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) the temperature of the cosmic neutrino background (CνB) can be estimated. It involves a change between two regimes: Regime 1 The original state of the universe is a thermal equilibrium, the final stage of which has photons and leptons freely creating each other through annihilation (leptons create photons) and pair production (photons create leptons). This was the very brief state, right after the Big Bang. Its last stage involves only the lowest-mass possible fermions that interact with photons: electrons and positrons. Regime 2 Once the universe has expanded enough that the photon+lepton plasma has cooled to the point that Big Bang photons no longer have enough energy for pair production of the lowest mass/energy leptons, the remaining electron–positron pairs annihilate. The photons they create are cool, and are then unable to create new particle pairs. This is the current state of most of the universe. At very high temperatures, before neutrinos decoupled from the rest of matter, the universe primarily consisted of neutrinos, electrons, positrons, and photons, all in thermal equilibrium with each other.

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