Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2014 iii Paper 49 2 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Let , and retain the assumption that these neutrinos remain massless. Constancy of the neutrino degeneracy parameter gives . The condition on the critical density therefore yields the critical-density bound on massless neutrino degeneracyFor the standard instantaneous-neutrino decoupling approximation before electron-positron annihilation in cosmology, cosmological entropy conservation heats photons relative to the decoupled neutrinos. The electromagnetic entropy degrees of freedom change from to , givingThis numerical value requires that thermal-history assumption; the bound in terms of is the general answer if large degeneracy changes decoupling or subsequent entropy transfer. Setting would instead give . For equally degenerate flavors with the same temperature, the leading bound becomes under the standard temperature assumption. The neglected thermal corrections make a small change near this loose energy-density limit; this is not a detailed Big Bang nucleosynthesis bound.