1999/07/27 by Manoj Kaplinghat, Robert E. Lopez, Scott Dodelson +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmic neutrino background #Cosmic ray #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Momentum (technical analysis) #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutrino detector #Neutrino oscillation #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Range (aeronautics) #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.60.123508
published as Phys.Rev.D60:123508,1999 · Revtex, 12 pages, 5 embedded figures
arxiv created 1999/07/27 · openalex publication_date 1999/11/23 · arxiv updated 2011/02/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
A massive neutrino which decays after recombination (t>~1013 sec) into relativistic decay products produces an enhanced integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, allowing constraints to be placed on such neutrinos from present cosmic microwave background anisotropy data. Previous treatments of this problem have approximated the decay products as an additional component of the neutrino background. This approach violates energy-momentum conservation, and we show that it leads to serious errors for some neutrino masses and lifetimes. We redo this calculation more accurately, by correctly incorporating the spatial distribution of the decay products. For low neutrino masses and long lifetimes, we obtain a much smaller distortion in the CMB fluctuation spectrum than have previous treatments. We combine these new results with a recent set of CMB data to exclude the mass and lifetime range mh>100 eV, \ensuremathτ>1012 sec. Masses as low as 30 eV are excluded for a narrower range in lifetime.