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Towards a precision calculation of $N_{\rm eff}$ in the Standard Model III: Improved estimate of NLO contributions to the collision integral

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arxiv 2402.18481 v2 pith:AYLLSLSN submitted 2024-02-28 hep-ph astro-ph.CO

classification hep-phastro-ph.CO
keywords correctionestimateratebelowbenchmarkcontributionsinteractionmodel
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abstract

We compute the dominant QED correction to the neutrino-electron interaction rate in the vicinity of neutrino decoupling in the early universe, and estimate its impact on the effective number of neutrino species $N_{\rm eff}$ in cosmic microwave background anisotropy observations. We find that the correction to the interaction rate is at the sub-percent level, consistent with a recent estimate by Jackson and Laine. Relative to that work we include the electron mass in our computations, but restrict our analysis to the enhanced $t$-channel contributions. The fractional change in $N_{\rm eff}^{\rm SM}$ due to the rate correction is of order $10^{-5}$ or below, i.e., about a factor of 30 smaller than that recently claimed by Cielo {\it et al.}, and below the nominal computational uncertainties of the current benchmark value of $N_{\rm eff}^{\rm SM} = 3.0440 \pm 0.0002$. We therefore conclude that aforementioned number remains to be the state-of-the-art benchmark for $N_{\rm eff}^{\rm SM}$ in the standard model of particle physics.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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