Anthropic predictions for neutrino masses


Fig 2.: Anthropic constraints on the sum of the three neutrino masses

Please click here to download our paper. Click here if you are interested in other research of mine.

Authors:

Max Tegmark, Alexander Vilenkin & Levon Pogosian

Abstract:

It is argued that small values of the neutrino masses may be due to anthropic selection effects. If this is the case, then the combined mass of the three neutrino species is expected to be ~1eV, neutrinos causing a non-negligible suppression of galaxy formation.

Reference info:

astro-ph/0304536, PRD, in press

Links:

The taboo of the ``A-word'' seem to be weakening in the physics community, as you'll see if you click here to search for anthropic on arxiv.org. My last search gave as many as 128 hits, mostly recent work, providing a good entry point into the literature. Our paper above focuses merely on neutrino mass. I've previously written papers about anthropic constraints on the CMB fluctuation amplitude and the dimensionality of spacetime. I reviewed the anthropic contraints (that I knew of at the time) on all physical and cosmological parameters in section 4 of this paper, and gave a brief but more accessible account in my Scientific American article about parallel universes.
Return to my home page
This page was last modified May 8, 2005.
tegmark@mit.edu