Paper 2, Section I, D
(a) The equilibrium distribution for the energy density of a massless neutrino takes the form
Show that this can be expressed in the form , where the constant need not be evaluated explicitly.
(b) In the early universe, the entropy density at a temperature is where is the total effective spin degrees of freedom. Briefly explain why , each term of which consists of two separate components as follows: the contribution from each massless species in equilibrium is
and a similar sum for massless species which have decoupled,
where in each case is the degeneracy and is the temperature of the species .
The three species of neutrinos and antineutrinos decouple from equilibrium at a temperature , after which positrons and electrons annihilate at , leaving photons in equilibrium with a small excess population of electrons. Using entropy considerations, explain why the ratio of the neutrino and photon temperatures today is given by