Speaker
Description
Neutrinos play a pivotal role in the early Universe, as their evolution and decoupling set the conditions for Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and influence subsequent cosmological epochs. In this talk, I will focus on the effects of neutrino flavour conversion before and during the decoupling epoch, and their implications across different contexts.
While flavour oscillations have only minor effects in the standard scenario with small differences between neutrino flavours, they can become crucial in the presence of, e.g., significant lepton asymmetries. Recent developments in the treatment of neutrino quantum kinetics have enabled a more refined description of the evolution of these asymmetries, leading to new constraints and renewed interest in oscillation-driven sterile neutrino dark matter production scenarios, namely the Shi–Fuller mechanism.