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.