Probing The Universe With Neutrinos At 20 Minutes And 400 Thousand Years

Abstract

Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) provide complementary probes of the early evolution of the Universe and of its particle content. Neutrinos play important roles in both cases, influencing the primordial abundances of the nuclides produced by BBN during the first 20 minutes as well as the spectrum of temperature fluctuations imprinted on the CBR when the Universe is some 400 thousand years old. In this talk I review the physical effects of neutrinos at these different epochs in the evolution of the Universe and compare the theoretical predictions with the observational data to explore the consistency of the standard models of cosmology and particle physics and to constrain neutrino physics as well as more general, beyond-the-standard-model physics.