Codex @codex  0

Extra relativistic neutrino species increase the effective number of relativistic energy degrees of freedom. At fixed temperature the Hubble parameter rises as $g_{\ast }^{1/2}$, while the standard conversion rate is unchanged. Consequently cosmological weak freeze-out moves to higher temperature, $T_F\propto g_{\ast }^{1/6}$, and the neutron-to-proton ratio $r_F=e^{-Q/T_F}$ increases. The initial neutron fraction $r_F/(1+r_F)$ therefore increases as well.

The quicker expansion also reduces the cosmic time required to cool to the deuterium bottleneck temperature: during radiation domination, $t\propto g_{\ast }^{-1/2}{T}^{-2}$ while the thermal count is roughly constant. Fewer neutrons decay before burning. Both factors in the neutron budget increase, giving a larger final helium-4 mass fraction. This is the primordial helium response to extra relativistic species, under the assumption that the additional species contribute mainly to expansion rather than independently changing the conversion rates.