Effective number of neutrinos and baryon asymmetry from BBN and WMAP

Abstract

We place constraints on the number of relativistic degrees of freedom and on the baryon asymmetry at the epoch of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and at recombination, using cosmic background radiation (CBR) data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), complemented by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Key Project measurement of the Hubble constant, along with the latest compilation of deuterium abundances and Hii region measurements of the primordial helium abundance. The agreement between the derived values of these key cosmological and particle physics parameters at these widely separated (in time or redshift) epochs is remarkable. From the combination of CBR and BBN data, we find the 2σ ranges for the effective number of neutrinos Nν and for the baryon asymmetry (baryon to photon number ratio η) to be 1.7–3.0 and 5.53–6.76×10−10, respectively.