Increasing Neff with particles in thermal equilibrium with neutrinos

Abstract

Recent work on increasing the effective number of neutrino species (Neff) in the early universe has focussed on introducing extra relativistic species ('dark radiation'). We draw attention to another possibility: a new particle of mass ≲10 MeV that remains in thermal equilibrium with neutrinos until it becomes non-relativistic increases the neutrino temperature relative to the photons. We demonstrate that this leads to a value of Neff that is greater than three and that Neff at CMB formation is larger than at BBN. We investigate the constraints on such particles from the primordial abundance of helium and deuterium created during BBN and from the CMB power spectrum measured by ACT and SPT and find that they are presently relatively unconstrained. We forecast the sensitivity of the Planck satellite to this scenario: in addition to dramatically improving constraints on the particle mass, in some regions of parameter space it can discriminate between the new particle being a real or complex scalar.