Relic neutrino decoupling including flavour oscillations

In the early universe, neutrinos are slightly coupled when electron-positron pairs annihilate transferring their entropy to photons. This process originates non-thermal distortions on the neutrino spectra which depend on neutrino flavour, larger for v(e) than for v(mu) or v(tau). We study the effect of three-neutrino flavour oscillations on the process of neutrino decoupling by solving the momentum-dependent kinetic equations for the neutrino spectra. We find that oscillations do not essentially modify the total change in the neutrino energy density, giving N-eff = 3.046 in terms of the effective number of neutrinos, while the small effect over the production of primordial He-4 is increased by O(20%), up to 2.1 x 10(-4). These results are stable within the presently favoured region of neutrino mixing parameters. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.