Non-linear description of massive neutrinos in the framework of large-scale structure formation

Abstract

There is now no doubt that neutrinos are massive particles fully involved in the non-linear growth of the large-scale structure of the universe. A problem is that they are particularly difficult to include in cosmological models because the equations describing their behavior in the non-linear regime are cumbersome and difficult to handle. In this manuscript I present a new method allowing to deal with massive neutrinos in a very simple way, based on basic conservation laws. This method is still valid in the non-linear regime. The key idea is to describe neutrinos as a collection of single-flow fluids instead of seeing them as a single hot multi-flow fluid. In this framework, the time evolution of neutrinos is encoded in fluid equations describing macroscopic fields, just as what is done for cold dark matter. Although valid up to shell-crossing only, this approach is a further step towards a fully non-linear treatment of the dynamical evolution of neutrinos in the framework of large-scale structure growth.