Impact of non-standard neutrino-electron interactions on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-standard neutrino-electron interactions influence Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, updating previous models to explore their effects on light element production and comparing cosmological bounds with terrestrial experiments.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of non-standard neutrino-electron interactions' impact on BBN across an extended parameter space.

Findings

BBN bounds are less restrictive than terrestrial experimental limits.

BBN constraints are complementary to terrestrial bounds, testing neutrino physics at different epochs.

Extended parameter space allows for a more complete understanding of NSI effects on early universe nucleosynthesis.

Abstract

Neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI) with electrons, predicted in many extended theoretical models of particle physics, are known to alter the picture of neutrino decoupling from the cosmic plasma. We update previous analyses of neutrino decoupling in presence of NSI with electrons, extending the parameter space in order to provide, for the first time, a full study of their effect on the production of light elements during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). We compare the BBN bounds on non-universal and flavour-changing NSI parameters with the constraints from terrestrial experiments. Our results show that the limits from BBN are significantly less stringent than the experimental bounds, but they are complementary and can provide a test of neutrino physics at different temperature scales and epochs.