Mini-charged tau neutrinos?

Abstract

Theoretically, the electric charge of the tau neutrino may be non-zero. The experimental bound on the electric charge of the tau neutrino is many orders of magnitude weaker than that for any other known neutrino. If the tau neutrino does have a small electric charge, and its mass is greater than 1 MeV, then it can annihilate sufficiently in the early Universe by electromagnetic interactions to avoid conflict with the standard cosmology model. A novel feature of this scenario is that there can be effectively less than three neutrino species present during nucleosynthesis.

Comments: 8 pages in LaTeX, 1 uuencoded figure file appended, PURD-TH-93-10