Sterile Neutrino Hot, Warm, and Cold Dark Matter

By K. Abazajian, G. Fuller, Mitesh Patel. 2001

448 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Author(s): Abazajian, K; Fuller, GM; Patel, M | Abstract: We calculate the incoherent resonant and non-resonant scattering production of sterile neutrinos in the early universe. We find ranges of sterile neutrino masses, vacuum mixing angles, and initial lepton numbers which allow these species to constitute viable hot, warm, and cold dark matter (HDM, WDM, CDM) candidates which meet observational constraints. The constraints considered here include energy loss in core collapse supernovae, energy density limits at big bang nucleosynthesis, and those stemming from sterile neutrino decay: limits from observed cosmic microwave background anisotropies, diffuse extragalactic background radiation, and 6Li/D overproduction. Our calculations explicitly include matter effects, both effective mixing angle suppression and enhancement (MSW resonance), as well as quantum damping. We for the first time properly include all finite temperature effects, dilution resulting from the annihilation or disappearance of relativistic degrees of freedom, and the scattering-rate-enhancing effects of particle-antiparticle pairs (muons, tauons, quarks) at high temperature in the early universe.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/658bc4169619f34bad5b413fe7022866d2b5fb8e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

The Observed Properties of Dark Matter on Small Spatial Scales (2007, background): “Rather interestingly, intermediate-mass (keV) sterile neutrino particles have been discussed (see, e.g., Dodelson&Widrow 1994; Abazajian et al. 2001; Kusenko 2006; Biermann & Munyaneza 2007a, 2007b) as relevant in just the spatial and density range we have derived here.”
THE DENSITY PROFILES OF MASSIVE, RELAXED GALAXY CLUSTERS. II. SEPARATING LUMINOUS AND DARK MATTER IN CLUSTER CORES (2012, background): “These include warm sterile neutrinos at the ∼ keV scale (e.g., Abazajian et al. 2001; Boyarsky et al. 2009; Macciò et al. 2012; Menci et al. 2012), “fuzzy” CDM composed from an ultralight scalar particle (Hu et al. 2000; Woo & Chiueh 2009), dark matter produced from early decays (Kaplinghat 2005),…”
The Role of Sterile Neutrinos in Cosmology and Astrophysics (2008, background): “lows to make ﬁrst principle computation of their abundance via certain equilibrium ﬁnite temperature Green’s functions computed in the SM without inclusion of right-handed fermions [53, 54, 49]. (See [31, 55, 56] for earlier computations of sterile neutrino DM abundance. The sterile neutrino oscilla”