Reactor sterile neutrinos, dark energy and the age of the universe

TL;DR

This paper explores how the existence of two light sterile neutrinos, suggested by reactor and other neutrino experiments, impacts cosmological parameters, challenging the cosmological constant model and suggesting a younger universe.

Contribution

It demonstrates that sterile neutrinos with eV-scale masses significantly affect cosmological data interpretations, ruling out the cosmological constant as dark energy at 95% confidence.

Findings

Two sterile neutrinos would exclude the cosmological constant as dark energy.

Presence of sterile neutrinos lowers the universe's age to approximately 12.6 billion years.

Sterile neutrinos influence cosmological parameter estimations from CMB, LSS, and SN1A data.

Abstract

There are indications that the neutrino oscillation data from reactor experiments and the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments show a preference for two sterile neutrino species, both with masses in the eV region. We show that this result has a significant impact on some important cosmological parameters. Specifically, we use a combination of CMB, LSS and SN1A data and show that the existence of two light, sterile neutrinos would rule out the cosmological constant as dark energy at 95% confidence level, and lower the expansion age of the universe to 12.58 \pm 0.26 Gyr.