Friday, 1 December 2017

cosmology - Where is radiation density in the Planck 2013 results?



I've been looking at the Planck 2013 cosmological parameters paper, trying to update my toy cosmology simulator with the most recent data. Most of the interesting values such as H0, Ωm, and ΩΛ can be found in Table 2 on page 12, but the one thing I didn't find was an estimate of the energy density of radiation. Can this be derived from some other parameters in these data?



Answer



The radiation density has two components: the present-day photon density ργ and the neutrino density ρν. The photon density as a function of frequency can be derived directly from the CMB: the photon number density follows the Planck law n(ν)dν=8πν2c3dνehν/kBT01, with kB the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, and T0 the current CMB temperature. The photon energy density is then ργc2=0hνn(ν)dν=aBT40, where aB=8π5k4B15h3c3=7.56577×1016Jm3K4 is the radiation energy constant. With T0=2.7255K, we get ργ=aBT40c2=4.64511×1031kgm3. The neutrino density is related to the photon density: in Eq. (1) on page 5 in the paper, you see that ρν=3.04678(411)4/3ργ. This relation can be derived from physics in the early universe, when neutrinos and photons were in thermal equilibrium. So ρν=3.21334×1031kgm3, and the total present-day radiation density is ρR,0=ργ+ρν=7.85846×1031kgm3. We can also express this relative to the present-day critical density ρc,0=3H208πG=1.87847h2×1026kgm3, where the Hubble constant is expressed in terms of the dimensionless parameter h, as H0=100hkms1Mpc1, so we get Ωγh2=ργρc,0h2=2.47282×105,Ωνh2=ρνρc,0h2=1.71061×105,ΩR,0h2=Ωγh2+Ωνh2=4.18343×105. For a Hubble value h=0.673, one finds ΩR,0=9.23640×105.


I should point out that the formulae for the primordial neutrinos is only valid when they are relativistic, which was true in the early universe. Since neutrinos have a tiny mass, they are probably no longer relativistic in the present-day universe, and behave now like matter instead of radiation. Therefore, neutrinos only contributed to the radiation density in the early universe, while the present-day radiation density only consists of photons.


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