Cosmic Neutrino Last Scattering Surface

Neutrinos decoupled from the rest of the cosmic plasma when the Universe was less than one second old, far earlier than the photons which decoupled at t=380,000 years. Surprisingly, though, the last scattering surface of the neutrinos is much closer to us than that of the photons. Here we calculate the properties of the last scattering surfaces of the three species of neutrinos.Comment: Important reference to earlier work of Bisnovatyi-Kogan and Seidov added, and mis-spelling of Opher reference correcte

Charged current cross section for massive cosmological neutrinos impinging on radioactive nuclei

We discuss the cross section formula both for massless and massive neutrinos on stable and radioactive nuclei. The latter could be of interest for the detection of cosmological neutrinos whose observation is one of the main challenges of modern cosmology. We analyze the signal to background ratio as a function of the ratio of the neutrino mass over the detector resolution and show that an energy resolution less than 0.5 eV would be required for sub-eV neutrino masses, independently of the gravitational neutrino clustering. Finally we mention the non-resonant character of neutrino capture on radioactive nuclei.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure