Sterile neutrinos: The Dark side of the light fermions

By A. Kusenko. 2009

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The discovery of neutrino masses suggests the likely existence of gauge singlet fermions that participate in the neutrino mass generation via the seesaw mechanism. The masses of the corresponding degrees of freedom can range from well below the electroweak scale to the Planck scale. If some of the singlet fermions are light, the sterile neutrinos appear in the low-energy effective theory. They can play an important role in astrophysics and cosmology. In particular, sterile neutrinos with masses of several keV can account for cosmological dark matter, which can be relatively warm or cold, depending on the production mechanism. The same particles can explain the observed velocities of pulsars because of the anisotropy in their emission from a cooling neutron star born in a supernova explosion. Decays of the relic sterile neutrinos can produce a flux of X-rays that can affect the formation of the first stars. Existing and future X-ray telescopes can be used to search for the relic sterile neutrinos.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3392b8fcaaa8ac001481d38989da64e23a4c3d9d

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Citations in the corpus

Three-dimensional neutrino-driven supernovae: neutron star kicks, spins, and asymmetric ejection of nucleosynthesis products (2012, background): “…asymmetries of the neutrino transport out of the hot PNS, e.g. by changing the neutrinomatter interaction opacities, coupling to a neutrino magnetic moment, or affecting neutrino-flavor conversions via the MSW effect (e.g., Bisnovatyi-Kogan 1996; Arras & Lai 1999; Kusenko 2009; Kishimoto 2011).”
Dark Matter, Baryogenesis and Neutrino Oscillations from Right Handed Neutrinos (2012, background): “The possibility of sterile neutrino DM has been studied by many authors in the past, see [21, 89] for reviews.”
Freeze-in production of FIMP dark matter (2009, neutral): “[17 19].”
Dark Matter Candidates from Particle Physics and Methods of Detection (2010, background): “2 Mpc for production from oscillations, L-enhanced production (depending on L), and production through Higgs decay, respectively (232).”
A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, background): “(See a review [399] for HNLs in astrophysics.”
Constraining light dark matter with diffuse X-ray and gamma-ray observations (2013, background): “, [36, 38–40, 45–51, 51– 57].”
New production mechanism for keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter by decays of frozen-in scalars (2013, background): “This contribution depends on the active-sterile mixing angle θ1 of the keV sterile neutrino N1, and it can be estimated by the approximate formula [125]:”
THE VELOCITY WIDTH FUNCTION OF GALAXIES FROM THE 40% ALFALFA SURVEY: SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE COLD DARK MATTER OVERABUNDANCE PROBLEM (2011, background): “A number of theoretical microscopic models for WDM have been proposed, most commonly involving sterile neutrinos (Dodelson & Widrow 1994; Fuller et al. 2003; Asaka et al. 2005; Kusenko 2009).”
The distribution of dark matter in galaxies (2018, background): “These particles can be created in the early Universe in a variety of ways (Dodelson and Widrow 1994; Shi and Fuller 1999; Kusenko 2009).”
Flavor structures of charged fermions and massive neutrinos (2019, background): “The CP-violating asymmetry between Ni → `α + H and Ni → `α + H decays in the early Universe provides a natural possibility of generating an intriguing lepton-antilepton asymmetry.”
The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos (2013, neutral): “[72, 74, 203, 204, 312, 358, 370, 493–514, 514–535] .”