Neutrino Fever and How I Recovered,
Prof. Lloyd Knox, UC-Davis
By now bored with the successes of our own standard model, cosmologists
yearn for evidence of something new, indicating, e.g., that dark energy
is not a cosmological constant, or that the primordial density
inhomogeneities have unexpected statistical properties. Recently
there has been excitement, feverish in some quarters, about the
possibility of extra species of neutrinos. I will tell the story of my
own few-month-long bout with neutrino fever. I will pay particular
attention to signatures of neutrinos in the cosmic microwave background
while also weaving in some evidence from reactors, accelerator-created
neutrinos, and observations of Helium in extragalactic gas clouds.