Critical-density mass of a thermal relic neutrino Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
A standard thermal Cosmic neutrino background with one populated neutrino and one antineutrino helicity per species has after electron-positron annihilation in cosmology. If this species is nonrelativistic today and dominates a spatially flat matter universe, equate to the critical density , using the unreduced Planck mass. The photon number density gives the displayed conditional mass. Extra populated states or several massive species change the abundance count; vacuum-dominated cosmology changes the density available for matter.
For one massless neutrino flavor with one helicity per member and , the Fermi-Dirac distribution fills momentum states up to the positive chemical potential. If , the neutrino density is and the antineutrino contribution is approximately . For negative chemical potential the roles reverse. Thus the leading total energy density is even in and has no factor of two from the two species. Extra populated internal degrees of freedom do multiply it. This distinction prevents using a positive-degeneracy approximation for an exponentially dilute negative-chemical-potential distribution.
Electron antineutrino Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
The antineutrino associated with the electron flavour of the weak charged current. It has zero electric charge and lepton number in the usual production-and-detection description.
From renormalizability to electroweak predictions Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
The 1999 recognition of Gerard 't Hooft and Martinus J. G. Veltman concerned the theoretical quantum structure of the electroweak interaction.[ref] Renormalizability makes repeated radiative corrections predictive from a fixed set of inputs. It does not imply that the perturbation series converges, nor that renormalization alone chooses the correct particle content or excludes all physics beyond the Standard Model.
The Gargamelle collaboration prepared an experimental test by exposing its heavy-liquid bubble chamber to neutrino and antineutrino beams at CERN. The readout selected events producing hadrons without an identified muon or electron, compared with events containing a charged lepton. Its 1974 report assessed alternative origins from neutrons and long-lived neutral kaons, finding them insufficient to explain the sample. That supported neutral currents; it did not isolate a radiative correction or demonstrate renormalizability.[ref]
The distinction matters when using the tree-level electroweak gauge-boson masses:Beyond tree level, self-energies, interaction vertices and counterterms alter how chosen input observables predict another observable. The Weinberg angle then needs a specified renormalization scheme; inserting its value from one convention into a formula from another can create an apparent discrepancy. A meaningful higher-order test must state both its independent experimental inputs and the calculated loop order.
Gargamelle Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Gargamelle was a heavy-liquid bubble chamber at CERN. Its 1973 collaboration report, Observation of neutrino-like interactions without muon or electron in the Gargamelle neutrino experiment, by F. J. Hasert and colleagues, described hadronic events with no identified muon or electron and evaluated rates relative to charged current events. This is evidence for a neutral current, rather than direct production or photography of a Z boson.[ref]
Observation of neutrino-like interactions without muon or electron in the Gargamelle neutrino experiment by F. J. Hasert. Physics Letters B 46 (1973), pp. 138–140, title, abstract and author list
CERN's Gargamelle account identifies the target liquid as and distinguishes hadronic events from the separate isolated-electron signal. The latter is an antineutrino transferring momentum to an electron, whose electromagnetic particle shower supplies visible tracks. These are different final states, not two names for one event.[ref]
Forty years of neutral currents by Cian O’Luanaigh. Forty years of neutral currents, 19 July 2013, chamber description and isolated-electron caption
A neutrino beam uses protons striking a target to produce charged pions and kaons; focusing selects parents that undergo particle decay in flight. Their neutrinos pass through shielding into the target. Scanning photographs locates vertices and classifies outgoing tracks.[ref]
Expansion prepares a bubble chamber's superheated liquid; ionization by charged secondaries seeds bubbles for photography.[ref]
The recorded light reveals bubbles, not a directly visible incoming or outgoing neutrino. Reconstructing a vertex and classifying bubble-chamber tracks connects that optical record to a hypothesis about a particle interaction.
The collaboration compared samples with matched hadronic cuts. A flat longitudinal vertex distribution resembled neutrino interactions, but sideways neutrons and multi-step cascades could also flatten it. The background estimate combined visible parent-interaction/secondary-neutron pairs with a cascade calculation including surrounding material. Later proton exposures tested the predicted cascade lengths. Escaping charged hadrons could imitate muons; there was no independent perfect muon tag.[ref]
The inference combines positive evidence for an interaction with controlled alternatives for its visible final state. Shielding suppresses unwanted beam components, yet interactions in surrounding material can generate secondary neutrons; shielding alone cannot certify a neutral current. Nor does a successful neutral current search by itself establish every coupling or the Higgs mechanism. Its importance for the electroweak interaction is that the theory predicts an additional weak channel, with coupling relations that further cross section measurements can test.
Leptonic pseudoscalar decay width Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
In the convention , the Fermi interaction gives . With a massless antineutrino, the external Dirac equations reduce this to . The spin sum is . The two-body Lorentz-invariant phase space has integrated value , and the initial flux factor is , giving the displayed width. If the decay constant is instead defined without the square root of two, and the denominator is . A weak mixing coefficient multiplies the amplitude and its modulus squared multiplies the width.
Massless leptonic W decay width 2026-10-14
The chiral weak charged current vertex gives the spin-averaged squared matrix element for an on-shell W boson decaying to a massless charged lepton and antineutrino. Integrating two-body Lorentz-invariant phase space gives . The massive-vector spin average divides by three; an extra neutrino-helicity factor would incorrectly double count the chiral projector.
Muon antineutrino Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-11-05
The antineutrino associated with the muon flavour of the weak charged current has zero electric charge and lepton number in the usual production-and-detection description. A negative muon decays to an electron, an electron antineutrino and a muon neutrino; the charge-conjugate process instead produces the muon antineutrino.
Muon-neutrino electron recoil spectrum Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
For an especially simple neutral current example, scatter a muon neutrino elastically from an initially stationary unpolarized electron:Here is the final electron kinetic energy, is the incident neutrino energy, and is the Weinberg angle. These are electron chiral couplings in the vertex convention of neutral-current vector and axial couplings. The chosen muon neutrino elastic channel has no additional W boson exchange amplitude; the electron-neutrino elastic channel would have one. Other charged-current final states can become kinematically accessible at sufficiently high incident energies and are not part of this elastic model.
Use natural units , retain only tree-level Feynman diagrams, and take the contact limit with . Neglect electron-mass terms relative to , radiative corrections and detector response. Then is the Fermi constant. The approximate endpoint replaces the exact elastic endpoint . The omitted leading mass-dependent interference term in is . Thus the approximation is not appropriate for arbitrarily soft neutrinos.
The shape follows from the two chiral contributions to the massless scattering amplitude. The spin sum gives terms proportional to and in Mandelstam variables; in this limit , giving the square . The two electron chiralities do not interfere when the relevant mass corrections are dropped. Replacing the neutrino by its antineutrino exchanges which coupling multiplies each kinematic term. This is the same chiral angular weighting that appears in neutrino scattering on an antiquark, now with a target whose couplings are particularly simple.
Integrating the two elementary terms givesFor an original teaching example choose , so and . This is a stipulated parameter, not a measurement of the Weinberg angle. ThenThe normalized probability density function is , not the unnormalized differential cross section. Its endpoints have ratio two, and the fraction with is . The antineutrino spectrum happens to coincide at this chosen parameter because ; this equality is not a general prediction for arbitrary Weinberg angles.
Unlike a visible electron recoil, the scattered neutrino is unrecorded. A measured recoil spectrum must therefore be compared with incident neutrino flux, energy distribution, acceptance, detection efficiency and backgrounds. A shape or rate tests a specified theoretical model only after these experimental ingredients have been supplied.
Neutrino matter potential Created 2026-10-25 Updated 2026-11-05
Coherent forward weak scattering in ordinary matter changes neutrino propagation phases. The charged-current electron contribution gives the displayed potential difference, with the opposite sign for antineutrinos. A common neutral-current term can be removed from active-flavour oscillations. A sufficiently large effect requires propagation with the matter Hamiltonian rather than the vacuum formula.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2002 iii Paper 66 2 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Take metric and write . The outgoing electron and antineutrino momenta are and . Up to an irrelevant overall phase, the amplitude isA fermion spin sum givesAnticommuting through the massless momentum and gamma matrix, and using , reduces the trace to twice the four-gamma trace minus twice its counterpart. In particular its symmetric part isThe epsilon-tensor part is antisymmetric and contributes neither to the unpolarized polarization sum nor to the real linear polarization used below. There is no extra factor for selecting the neutrino helicity: the chiral vertex has already done so.
The external massless equations imply for , so . With , averaging over the three initial spin states givesIndeed . This is a massive-vector spin average, not an average over the final spins.
In the rest frame, eliminating the momentum delta function and integrating the remaining radial delta function reduces the two-body Lorentz-invariant phase space to . ThereforeThis derives the massless leptonic W decay width without invoking a precomputed decay formula.
For the specified polarization there is no initial spin average. Put , and . The contraction selectsIt follows thatHere . The total rate agrees with the spin-averaged result, but its normalized polar distribution is instead of the isotropic unpolarized distribution. This is polarized massless leptonic W decay.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2002 iii Paper 71 2 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
In the specified dust model , so and . Photons and the six neutrino/antineutrino helicity states giveUsing the supplied GeV estimates literally givesThe rounded time/temperature conversions are unusually crude: converting Gyr to and K to GeV instead gives . Either set gives the same order-of-magnitude mass conclusion below, but the numerical abundance should identify which supplied units are used.
For a stable relic, the relevant comparison is energy density, not merely particle number. The matter density left over after the baryons is at most nine times the baryon density here. ConsequentlyPut and use with . The condition becomesFor the literal supplied numbers the right side is about , giving and – GeV. With the physically consistent conversions the estimate is about GeV. The intended rough conclusion is therefore a sufficiently suppressed branch with no larger than order GeV, within the toy cosmological particle freeze-out law. Comparing the two number yields alone gives a similar rough scale but misses the mass weighting. This is a thermal relic density bound for a tunable fermion.
For , relativistic decoupling would instead leave , incompatible with the matter-density bound for such heavy stable particles. These are conditional bounds on a populated, stable thermal relic. A short lifetime or an initially suppressed nonthermal population can change the conclusion; the supplied information alone does not constrain every possible production and decay history.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2005 iii Paper 61 4 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-20
Use natural units, assume negligible neutrino chemical potentials, and approximate neutrino decoupling as occurring before electron-positron annihilation in cosmology. At high temperature, weak interactions maintain a common temperature for neutrinos, antineutrinos, electrons, Positrons and photons. Since , the reaction rate eventually loses against expansion. Decoupled relativistic neutrinos then free stream; their momenta redshift as , so their distribution retains a temperature parameter satisfying .
The still-coupled electromagnetic bath receives the entropy of annihilating electrons and Positrons. Its effective number of relativistic entropy degrees of freedom is initiallywhere the two photon polarizations count as bosonic states and the four electron-positron spin states have the fermion entropy weight . After the pairs disappear, . Cosmological entropy conservation in this coupled bath gives . The three already decoupled neutrino species are excluded from this bath's entropy count. At decoupling , henceSubsequent expansion preserves this ratio in the idealized history. Residual interactions during annihilation give small corrections to the instantaneous-decoupling approximation. If a relic species later becomes massive, here remains the redshifting momentum-distribution parameter; it need not be its nonrelativistic kinetic temperature.
A single ordinary neutrino species includes one populated neutrino helicity and one antineutrino helicity. For negligible chemical potential, integration of the Fermi-Dirac distribution givesTherefore the number density of a relativistic neutrino relative to photons, with the antiparticle included, isThe factor is the fermionic number-density weight, distinct from the energy and entropy weight . This relation continues to hold after this species becomes nonrelativistic if its comoving particle number is conserved.
Under the proposed matter-dominated, spatially flat model, the Friedmann equation requires the present relic-neutrino energy density to be approximately the critical density. Using the unreduced Planck mass givesThus the critical-density mass of a thermal relic neutrino isTaking the paper's rounded values, , and , givesFor , this is of order -- with these approximate constants. More precise constants change the coefficient, not the requested mass scale. This mass is much larger than the present momentum scale , validating the nonrelativistic energy density approximation. The result assumes that one thermal relic species dominates the matter density; it is conditional on that model rather than a measurement of a neutrino mass.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2012 iii Paper 53 2 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
For a quantitative thermal-relic prediction, assume one ordinary weakly interacting neutrino flavor: one populated neutrino helicity and one antineutrino helicity, negligible chemical potential, early thermal equilibrium, and relativistic decoupling around the MeV epoch. Equal neutrino and antineutrino populations imply no new lepton asymmetry. The Fermi-Dirac distribution is maintained while the weak interaction rate exceeds the expansion rate. After neutrino decoupling, the distribution free streams, its momentum scale falls as , and its comoving number is conserved. A mass of is negligible at Big Bang nucleosynthesis temperatures, but the relic later becomes nonrelativistic. Its energy density then changes from radiation-like scaling to matter-like scaling. Stability prevents its removal by decay; decoupling while relativistic prevents a subsequent equilibrium Boltzmann suppression of its number.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2012 iii Paper 53 2 i Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
Before electron-positron annihilation in cosmology, the pair has two spin states, just as photons do, and the fermionic number integral gives at equal temperature. The factor follows by expanding into an alternating exponential series: its integral is of the bosonic one.
After neutrino decoupling, cosmological entropy conservation in the photon-electron plasma changes its relativistic entropy count from to . The decoupled neutrinos do not share this heating. HenceThese counts include both the new neutrino and its antineutrino; another factor of two would double count them. This is the number density of a relativistic neutrino relative to photons, evaluated after photon heating.
They are nonrelativistic today, so the relic-neutrino energy density is dominated by rest mass:The number follows from the supplied critical density, without a Hubble-unit convention. It is conditional on the thermal history stated above; a sterile, colder or nonthermally produced state need not have this abundance.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2014 iii Paper 49 2 i Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Use and count one populated helicity per neutrino or antineutrino. For massless particles, the Fermi-Dirac distribution givesWhen , the occupied states form an almost sharp Fermi sea. Replacing the distribution by givesThe relative finite-temperature correction is of order .
Chemical equilibrium gives . For positive large , the corresponding antineutrino distribution is dilute, soIt is exponentially negligible. The neutrino degeneracy parameter is conserved in the assumed adiabatic massless evolution: redshifting preserves the distribution with both and proportional to .
There is a sign qualification in the printed absolute-value formula. If , the distribution of neutrinos themselves is exponentially suppressed, and the antineutrinos, with positive chemical potential, form the degenerate sea. In either case the degenerate neutrino and antineutrino energy density isThus the formula with describes the dominant member of the pair, or their leading total, rather than the named neutrino distribution for both signs. No extra factor of two is present: only one member is densely occupied. Additional populated internal states multiply the result by their degeneracy.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2015 iii Paper 53 2 1 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-20
A collisionless relativistic species redshifts with . The coupled plasma instead obeys cosmological entropy conservation, , and is heated relative to a decoupled species as massive particles annihilate. The effective number of relativistic energy degrees of freedom and effective number of relativistic entropy degrees of freedom coincide while all species share a common relativistic temperature. Use for the Standard Model bath, excluding the already decoupled extra species.
Just before ordinary neutrino decoupling, the coupled bath contains two photon states, four electron/Positron states and six ordinary neutrino/antineutrino states. ThereforeThe extra-neutrino temperature relative to that bath is then . After the ordinary neutrinos decouple, electron/Positron annihilation heats only the photon bath: its entropy count changes from to . Both neutrino populations miss that last heating, soThis is the two-stage entropy dilution of an early-decoupled neutrino. Numerically . Relative to ordinary relic neutrinos it is cooler by .
Let count the extra neutrino's populated helicity and antiparticle states. For one conventional neutrino plus antineutrino species , the same state count as photons. The Fermi-Dirac distribution supplies the number-density factor, soThus a two-state species has about of the photon number density. Stating explicitly also covers a different choice of populated states.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 305 3 a iii Solution Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-20
Forbidden by electric-charge conservation. The initial bottom quark has electric charge , while the displayed final electric charges sum to . Therefore no Standard Model Feynman diagram, at tree level or any loop order, can realize this channel.
This is an intentionally disallowed process, not a transcription correction. The charge-conserving semileptonic bottom decay instead has an electron and an antineutrino of electron flavour, while a Positron accompanies the conjugate antiquark decay. Replacing the displayed particles silently would change the requested classification.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2023 iii Paper 310 2 c Solution 2026-09-28
When , the Fermi-Dirac distribution approaches the step function for and zero for . For one internal state and negligible mass, the degenerate relic neutrino energy density is thereforeso .
At thermal equilibrium, the antineutrino chemical potential is . Its occupation is approximately , givingIt is exponentially smaller than the neutrino density; this particle-antiparticle imbalance is a cosmological lepton asymmetry.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2025 iii Paper 307 2 Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
The hierarchy problem is visible in the one-loop top-quark contribution to the Higgs boson mass parameter,In a supersymmetric theory the corresponding stop loop has the opposite quadratic term. If supersymmetry is softly broken, the remaining correction is roughlyThe two relevant one-loop Feynman diagrams are a Higgs two-point function with a closed top-quark loop and the analogous stop loop. Requiring the residual correction not to exceed the electroweak scale by many orders of magnitude gives the naturalness expectation , and broadly other sparticle masses, at a few TeV or below. This is an order-of-magnitude argument rather than a mass bound.
R-parity iswhere is baryon number, is lepton number and is spin angular momentum. Standard Model particles have , while their superpartners have . The renormalizable R-parity-violating superpotential of the Minimal supersymmetric Standard Model iswith and .
Combining with produces proton decay through exchange of a virtual right-handed down-type squark. The tree diagram has and entering the baryon-number-violating vertex, an internal line, and the lepton-number-violating vertex emitting and a light quark. Hadronization givesThe invisible particle is an antineutrino of any family , and electric-charge conservation requires a positively charged pion. The antisymmetry of requires or .
Integrating out a squark of mass gives a dimension-six interaction with coefficient . Ignoring order-one hadronic and phase-space factors,For and , the factor before the couplings is about --. A lifetime above years is about , so andat order-of-magnitude accuracy. Hadronic matrix elements and flavour choices alter the numerical coefficient, not the conclusion that simultaneous baryon- and lepton-number violation is extraordinarily constrained.
The matter-parity factor is odd for every quark or lepton superfield and even for either Higgs superfield. Each term in contains an odd number of matter superfields, so R-parity forbids all four types of term. Standard MSSM Yukawa interactions contain two matter superfields and remain allowed.
Finally, the requested four-point interaction contains a squark, an antisquark, a boson and a gluon. It comes from the squark gauge-covariant kinetic termThe cross term isbecause the colour and weak generators commute. With all fields incoming, its Feynman rule iswith the conventional conversion when is replaced by .

