A possible signature of cosmic neutrino decoupling in the nHz region of the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves

Details A possible signature of cosmic neutrino decoupling in the nHz region of the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves A possible signature of cosmic neutrino decoupling in the nHz region of the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves

2010-10-19

arxiv.org/abs/1010.3849v2

Class. Quant. Grav. 27, 194008 (2010)

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

11 pages, 2 figures. V2: References Added

Scientific paper

10.1088/0264-9381/27/19/194008

In this paper we study the effect of cosmic neutrino decoupling on the spectrum of cosmological gravitational waves (GWs). At temperatures T>>1 MeV, neutrinos constitute a perfect fluid and do not hinder GW propagation, while for T<<1 MeV they free-stream and have an effective viscosity that damps cosmological GWs by a constant amount. In the intermediate regime, corresponding to neutrino decoupling, the damping is frequency-dependent. GWs entering the horizon during neutrino decoupling have a frequency f ~ 1 nHz, corresponding to a frequency region that will be probed by Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs). In particular, we show how neutrino decoupling induces a spectral feature in the spectrum of cosmological GWs just below 1 nHz. We briefly discuss the conditions for a detection of this feature and conclude that it is unlikely to be observed by PTAs.

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