Monday 19 September 2011

Evidence for dark radiation

I've just read this paper which looks deeply at the cosmic background radiation, and up dates our estimate for number of light (low mass) particles around the time of the big bang. The data clearly shows the equivalent of 4 neutrino species. This provides evidence for at least one unknown low mass particle, perhaps an additional low mass right handed neutrino, or any light scalar or vector super-symmetric neutrino as speculated about below. To be clear a axi-photon would not show up in the radiation count from CMB, because the axi-photon rapidly interacts with neutrinos to pair produce further neutrinos, as show in my paper. For temperatures belows a few MeV, almost no axi-photons would be present in the radiation count.