Relic cooling across muon annihilation

ID: relic-cooling-across-muon-annihilation

A relativistic relic that decouples between pion and muon annihilation keeps constant. The coupled bath initially contains photons, electron-positron pairs, muon-antimuon pairs and three neutrino-antineutrino species, with entropy degrees of freedom . After muon annihilation this is , giving the displayed temperature ratio. After neutrino decoupling, electron-positron annihilation heats photons by , so the final relic-to-photon ratio becomes . This counting assumes the species are relativistic when counted and treats annihilations and decoupling as sharp equilibrium transitions.

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