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  • Open Access

Neutrinos with refractive masses and the DESI baryon acoustic oscillation results

Manibrata Sen* and Alexei Y. Smirnov†

  • *Contact author: manibrata@mpi-hd.mpg.de
  • †Contact author: smirnov@mpi-hd.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. D 111, 103048 – Published 30 May, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/d9hh-b3r9

Abstract

Due to interactions with dark matter, neutrinos can acquire refractive masses which explain the data from oscillation experiments. We study the effects of relic neutrinos with refractive masses on structure formation in the Universe. In the model with a light fermionic mediator, above the resonance energy, ER, associated with the mass of the mediator, refractive masses have all the properties identical to the usual vacuum masses. Below the resonance, refractive masses decrease with neutrino energy, however, they cannot be used in the same way as usual masses. We study the dispersion relations and group velocities of such neutrinos and their dependence on redshift. We show that in the epoch of structure formation, relic neutrinos were ultrarelativistic and essentially massless particles for ER=(10−105)  eV. This allows us to reconcile the values of masses extracted from oscillation experiments with the stringent bounds on sum of neutrino masses from cosmological surveys.

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Phys. Rev. D 111, 103048– Published 30 May, 2025
  • Received 23 July 2024
  • Accepted 20 May 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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