For a significant fraction of the history of the universe, neutrinos freely fall through spacetime. While they only weakly interact with matter, neutrinos have a significant impact in astrophysics. Experimental neutrino physics and observational cosmology are amidst an interesting era, where precision measurements in both fields have significantly improved scientific understanding of the standard model of particle physics and of the universe. Experiments in neutrino physics have not only discerned that neutrinos are massive particles, but have also measured their relative masses (but not their absolute masses) and the quantum mechanical mixing matrix that is a consequence of these differing mass scales. Meanwhile, precision cosmological observations have determined the energy content of the universe, which in turn has presented a self-consistent story of the history and evolution of the universe and its contents. The topics discussed in this dissertation are based upon an interplay between these two fields, at times pushing the envelope, but always focused upon the basic physical processes that affect massive neutrinos in an expanding universe. A hearty, pedagogical introduction is presented to highlight the relevant neutrino physics described in this work and an overview of cosmology, strongly biased toward the early universe, the paradigm in which much of the work in this dissertation is based. Sterile neutrinos in different regimes of mass and mixing with active neutrinos are proposed as well as asymmetries between the number density of active neutrinos and antineutrinos in the early universe. The consequences of these two propositions are discussed in terms of observables such as primordial light element abundances and the observables related to a sterile neutrino dark matter candidate. Neutrino emission from high-entropy electron-positron plasmas are introduced, and the effects of this large flux of neutrinos and antineutrinos on hot hydrogen burning are explored. Finally, the nature of the cosmic neutrino background, a relic of the hot Big Bang, is discussed as they freely fall through spacetime from weak decoupling to the present epoch.

The principal hydrogen burning mechanisms that take place in stars have been elucidated and explored for many decades. However, the introduction of a prodigious flux of electron anti-neutrinos would significantly accelerate these mechanisms and change the path toward the production of an α particle. We discuss the nature of such changes in the hydrogen burning mechanisms, and the side effects spawned from such alterations. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.

We examine the effects of significant electron antineutrino fluxes on hydrogen burning. Specifically, we find that the bottleneck weak nuclear reactions in the traditional p-p chain and the hot CNO cycle can be accelerated by antineutrino capture, increasing the energy generation rate. We also discuss how antineutrino capture reactions can alter the conditions for break out into the rp-process. We speculate on the impact of these considerations for the evolution and dynamics of collapsing very massive and supermassive compact objects. © 2007. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

We argue that in at least a portion of the history of the Universe the relic background neutrinos are spatially extended, coherent superpositions of mass states. We show that an appropriate quantum mechanical treatment affects the neutrino mass values derived from cosmological data. The coherence scale of these neutrino flavor wave packets can be an appreciable fraction of the causal horizon size, raising the possibility of spacetime curvature-induced decoherence.

We examine medium-enhanced, neutrino scattering-induced decoherent production of dark matter candidate sterile neutrinos in the early universe. In cases with a significant net lepton number we find two resonances, where the effective in-medium mixing angles are large. We calculate the lepton number depletion-driven evolution of these resonances. We describe the dependence of this evolution on lepton numbers, sterile neutrino rest mass, and the active-sterile vacuum mixing angle. We find that this resonance evolution can result in relic sterile neutrino energy spectra with a generic form which is sharply peaked in energy. We compare our complete quantum kinetic equation treatment with the widely-used quantum Zeno ansatz. © 2008 The American Physical Society.

We explore the implications of the existence of heavy neutral fermions (i.e., sterile neutrinos) for the thermal history of the early universe. In particular, we consider sterile neutrinos with rest masses in the 100 MeV to 500 MeV range, with couplings to ordinary active neutrinos large enough to guarantee thermal and chemical equilibrium at epochs in the early universe with temperatures T > 1 GeV, but in a range to give decay lifetimes from seconds to minutes. Such neutrinos would decouple early, with relic densities comparable to those of photons, but decay out of equilibrium, with consequent prodigious entropy generation prior to, or during, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). Most of the ranges of sterile neutrino rest mass and lifetime considered are at odds with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) limits on the relativistic particle contribution to energy density (e.g., as parameterized by N_eff). However, some sterile neutrino parameters can lead to an acceptable N_eff. These parameter ranges are accompanied by considerable dilution of the ordinary background relic neutrinos, possibly an adverse effect on BBN, but sometimes fall in a range which can explain measured neutrino masses in some particle physics models. A robust signature of these sterile neutrinos would be a measured N_eff not equal to 3 coupled with no cosmological signal for neutrino rest mass when the detection thresholds for these probes are below laboratory-established neutrino mass values, either as established by the atmospheric neutrino oscillation scale or direct measurements with, e.g., KATRIN or neutrino-less double beta decay experiments.

We solve the problem of coherent Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein resonant active-to-sterile neutrino flavor conversion driven by an initial lepton number in the early Universe. We find incomplete destruction of the lepton number in this process and a sterile neutrino energy distribution with a distinctive cusp and high energy tail. These features imply alteration of the nonzero lepton number primordial nucleosynthesis paradigm when there exist sterile neutrinos with rest masses m(s) approximately 1 eV. This could result in better light element probes of (constraints on) these particles.

We present a model where sterile neutrinos with rest masses in the range ∼keV to ∼MeV can be the dark matter and be consistent with all laboratory, cosmological, and large-scale structure, as well as x-ray constraints. These sterile neutrinos are assumed to freeze out of thermal and chemical equilibrium with matter and radiation in the very early Universe, prior to an epoch of prodigious entropy generation ("dilution") from out-of-equilibrium decay of heavy particles. In this work, we consider heavy, entropy-producing particles in the ∼TeV to ∼EeV rest-mass range, possibly associated with new physics at high-energy scales. The process of dilution can give the sterile neutrinos the appropriate relic densities, but it also alters their energy spectra so that they could act like cold dark matter, despite relatively low rest masses as compared to conventional dark matter candidates. Moreover, since the model does not rely on active-sterile mixing for producing the relic density, the mixing angles can be small enough to evade current x-ray or lifetime constraints. Nevertheless, we discuss how future x-ray observations, future lepton number constraints, and future observations and sophisticated simulations of large-scale structure could, in conjunction, provide evidence for this model and/or constrain and probe its parameters.

We study primordial nucleosynthesis abundance yields for assumed ranges of cosmological lepton numbers, sterile neutrino mass-squared differences and active-sterile vacuum mixing angles. We fix the baryon-to-photon ratio at the value derived from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data and then calculate the deviation of the H2, He4, and Li7 abundance yields from those expected in the zero-lepton number(s), no-new-neutrino-physics case. We conclude that high precision (<5% error) measurements of the primordial H2 abundance from, e.g., QSO absorption line observations coupled with high precision (<1% error) baryon density measurements from the CMB could have the power to either: (i) reveal or rule out the existence of a light sterile neutrino if the sign of the cosmological lepton number is known; or (ii) place strong constraints on lepton numbers, sterile neutrino mixing properties and resonance sweep physics. Similar conclusions would hold if the primordial He4 abundance could be determined to better than 10%. © 2006 The American Physical Society.