Abstract
In the early universe, Dirac neutrino magnetic moments due to their chirality-flipping nature could lead to thermal production of right-handed neutrinos, which would make a significant contribution to the effective neutrino number, Neff. We present in this paper a dedicated computation of the neutrino chirality-flipping rate in the thermal plasma. With a careful and consistent treatment of soft scattering and the plasmon effect in finite temperature field theories, we find that neutrino magnetic moments above 2.7 × 10−12μB have been excluded by current CMB and BBN measurements of Neff, assuming flavor-universal and diagonal magnetic moments for all three generation of neutrinos. This limit is stronger than the latest bounds from XENONnT and LUX-ZEPLIN experiments and comparable with those from stellar cooling considerations.
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Li, SP., Xu, XJ. Neutrino magnetic moments meet precision Neff measurements. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 85 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2023)085
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2023)085