Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2009 iii Paper 55 3 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Count one neutrino species as the usual two thermally populated particle-antiparticle helicity states, with negligible chemical potential. Its entropy weight is . In the ideal high-temperature Standard Model, the bosonic count is from gluons, electroweak gauge bosons and the Higgs field. The fermionic count is from quarks, charged leptons and the three ordinary neutrino species. Hence the relativistic entropy content of the Standard Model is for the remaining bath. Before the new species leaves, the total count is ; its separately cooling states are excluded from the subsequent bath count.
Near ordinary neutrino decoupling, the still-coupled bath hasfrom photons, electron-positron pairs and the three ordinary neutrinos. After those neutrinos decouple, the electromagnetic bath falls from to two when the pairs annihilate. Cosmological entropy conservation in that bath gives .
The new species has cooled as since its earlier decoupling, whereas annihilation of Standard Model species heated the remaining bath. The temperature ratio of an early-decoupled neutrino is thusThese are ideal-gas estimates with the high-temperature count implicit in the question; precise electroweak thresholds change them slightly.
Entropy degrees of freedom weight temperature ratios with their cube, while energy degrees of freedom use their fourth power. The remaining Standard Model entropy today, in photon-temperature units, is . The new contribution is . Therefore the fractional entropy of a relativistically decoupled species isAbout 1.6% of the total entropy is in the new species. Separate comoving entropy conservation also derives this fraction directly at decoupling. A model populating four helicity states instead would require the corresponding doubled species count.