Robustness of cosmic neutrino background detection in the Co

Seminar

Robustness of cosmic neutrino background detection in the Cosmic Microwave Background

Antonio Cuesta (ICCUB)

Date

Wednesday, 4 February, 2015 at 10:00

Place

DAM seminar room (to be confirmed)

The existence of a cosmic neutrino background canbe probed indirectly by cosmic microwavebackground (CMB) experiments, not only by measuring the background density ofradiation in the universe, but also by searching for the typical signatures ofthe fluctuations of free-streaming species in the temperature and polarisationpower spectrum. Previous studies have already proposed a rather generic

parameterisation of these fluctuations, that couldhelp to discriminate between the signature of ordinary free-streamingneutrinos, or of more exotic dark radiation models. Current data are compatiblewith Standard values of these parameters, which seems to bring further evidencefor the existence of a cosmic neutrino background. In this work, we investigatethe robustness of this conclusion under various assumptions. We conclude thatit is possible to make a robust statement about the detection of the cosmicneutrino background by CMB experiments.