Anisotropy of the Cosmic Neutrino Background

Abstract

The cosmic neutrino background (CNB) consists of low-energy relic neutrinos which decoupled from the cosmological fluid at a redshift z ~ 10^{10}. Despite being the second-most abundant particles in the universe, direct observation remains a distant challenge. Based on the measured neutrino mass differences, one species of neutrinos may still be relativistic with a thermal distribution characterized by the temperature T ~ 1.9K. We show that the temperature distribution on the sky is anisotropic, much like the photon background, experiencing Sachs-Wolfe and integrated Sachs-Wolfe effects.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures / updated references, discussion of earlier wor