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Readers of Universe Today are probably already familiar with the concept of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Its serendipitous discovery by a pair of radio astronomers at Bell Labs is the stuff of astronomical legend. Over the past decades, it has offered plenty of insights into the Big Bang and the origins of our universe. But there is another, less well-known background signal that could be just as revolutionary \u2013 or at least we think there is. The Cosmic Neutrino Background (CvB) has been posited for years but has yet to be found, primarily because neutrinos are notoriously difficult to detect. Now, a paper from Professor Douglas Scott of the University of British Columbia, developed as part of a summer school on neutrinos held by the International School of AstroParticle Physics in the Italian town of Varenna, discusses what we could potentially learn if we do manage to detect the CvB eventually.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n The paper is written in a whimsical style and was released on arXiv, so it\u2019s unclear whether it will be formally peer-reviewed (or if the peer reviewers will remove the picture of the \u201celephant in the room\u201d). However, while it touches on some advanced mathematics, it mainly focuses on potential things we can learn from analyzing the CvB.\u00a0<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, many of those facts have much to do with neutrinos. We still don\u2019t know a lot about them, as Dr. Scott points out in his introduction. Why are there three types? How do they compare to one another? And one particularly painful thing for particle physicists is what exactly their masses are.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n