Lightest sterile neutrino abundance within the nuMSM

By T. Asaka, M. Laine, M. Shaposhnikov. 2006

225 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We determine the abundance of the lightest (dark matter) sterile neutrinos created in the Early Universe due to active-sterile neutrino transitions from the thermal plasma. Our starting point is the field-theoretic formula for the sterile neutrino production rate, derived in our previous work [JHEP 06(2006)053], which allows to systematically incorporate all relevant effects, and also to analyse various hadronic uncertainties. Our numerical results differ moderately from previous computations in the literature, and lead to an absolute upper bound on the mixing angles of the dark matter sterile neutrino. Comparing this bound with existing astrophysical X-ray constraints, we find that the Dodelson-Widrow scenario, which proposes sterile neutrinos generated by active-sterile neutrino transitions to be the sole source of dark matter, is only possible for sterile neutrino masses lighter than 3.5 keV (6 keV if all hadronic uncertainties are pushed in one direction and the most stringent X-ray bounds are relaxed by a factor of two). This upper bound may conflict with a lower bound from structure formation, but a definitive conclusion necessitates numerical simulations with the non-equilibrium momentum distribution function that we derive. If other production mechanisms are also operative, no upper bound on the sterile neutrino mass can be established.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c0d6185caa644e877cbe79d19974d65099afd52

How researchers see this paper

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

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Sterile neutrinos in cosmology (2017, methodology): “References [100, 101] subsequently developed a framework”
Lyman-alpha constraints on warm and on warm-plus-cold dark matter models (2008, methodology): “The wide gray band (labeled “NRP production”) shows the results of the computation of the NRP sterile neutrino abundance, taking into account uncertainties from QCD (see [132, 82] for details).”
Transport properties of the quark-gluon plasma (2011, background): “0 -3 10 -2 n α1 / n eq / (|M D | α1 / 0.1 eV) 2 x (M 1 / keV) uncertainty from the EOS uncertainty from scatterings α = e α = µ Fig.4.Concentration of sterile neutrinos produced in the early universe [32]. The dominant uncertainty comes from the limited knowledge of the spectral function. potentiall”
The Role of Sterile Neutrinos in Cosmology and Astrophysics (2008, background): “. The true distribution of sterile neutrinos is in fact colder than (28). Namely, the maximum of p2f N1(p) occurs at p/Tν ≈ 1.5 − 1.8 (depending on M 1), as compared to p ≈ 2.2Tν for the case of (28) [53, 54]. The NRP mechanism speciﬁes a minimal amount of DM that will be produced for given M 1 and ”
The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos (2013, background): “In that case they still have a momentum distribution that is proportional to a Fermi-Dirac spectrum [494, 539, 543, 544], which makes them a WDM candidate that is at least disfavoured by structure formation arguments (see below).”
A lower bound on the mass of dark matter particles (2008, background): “In the case of non-resonant production the primordial velocity spectrum is approximately proportional to the Fermi-Dirac distribution [62, 78] (the exact spectrum was calculated in [64, 65]).”
Dark Matter, Baryogenesis and Neutrino Oscillations from Right Handed Neutrinos (2012, background): “In absence of chemical potentials, the resulting spectrum of N1 momenta has been determined in [24].”
Constraints from Ly-α forests on non-thermal dark matter including resonantly-produced sterile neutrinos (2017, background): “In reality, this mapping is only approximate, since the actual phase-space distribution of NRP sterile neutrinos departs slightly from a rescaled Fermi-Dirac distribution [8, 66], and the authors of [75] suggest a mapping with κ = 3.”
A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, background): “The production through mixing with active neutrinos always contributes to the relic sterile neutrino abundance [116, 118, 726, 727].”
Sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2018, background): “ction mechanism. Heavy neutrinos can be produced in the decay of practically any heavier particle that the interact with. In the minimal seesaw model (12) they are e.g. produced in the decay of pions [38,452,484], the Higgs boson [422] and W bosons [435]. All these processes are subdominant in compa”
Neutrinoless double beta decay versus other probes of heavy sterile neutrinos (2019, background): “50 eV can be produced with quasi-thermal temperatures before the decoupling of active neutrinos via active-sterile oscillations [119, 175, 176].”