Pulsar kicks from a dark-matter sterile neutrino

By G. Fuller, A. Kusenko, I. Mocioiu, Silvia Pascoli. 2003

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that a sterile neutrino with mass in the 1-20 keV range and a small mixing with the electron neutrino can simultaneously explain the origin of the pulsar motions and the dark matter in the universe. An asymmetric neutrino emission from a hot nascent neutron star can be the explanation of the observed pulsar velocities. In addition to the pulsar kick mechanism based on resonant neutrino transitions, we point out a new possibility: an asymmetric off-resonant emission of sterile neutrinos. The two cases correspond to different values of the masses and mixing angles. In both cases we identify the ranges of parameters consistent with the pulsar kick, as well as cosmological constraints.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d1bb75aeada9c850eaff62517460e80bcfbb941

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Citations in the corpus

Constraints on sterile neutrinos as dark matter candidates from the diffuse X-ray background (2005, background): “Moreover, a sterile neutrino with these parameters is important for the physics of supernovas (Fryer & Kusenko 2006), and was proposed as an explanation of the pulsar kick velocities (Kusenko & Segre 1997; Fuller et al. 2003; Barkovich, D’Olivo & Montemayor 2004).”
Dark Matter, Baryogenesis and Neutrino Oscillations from Right Handed Neutrinos (2012, background): “Finally, DM sterile neutrinos may have interesting effects for supernova explosions [101–105].”
COMPACT BINARY MERGER RATES: COMPARISON WITH LIGO/VIRGO UPPER LIMITS (2015, background): “…neutrinos are produced, their immediate escape means that the escaping neutrinos are also asymmetric (Kusenko & Segre 1997; Nardi & Zuluaga 2001; Fuller et al. 2003; Kusenko 2005; Fryer & Kusenko 2006; Sagert & Schaffner-Bielich 2008; Kusenko 2009; Kisslinger, Henley & Johnson 2009; Kuznetsov &…”
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).”
A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, background): “An alternative non-resonant production mechanism was described in [877] (see also [875]) which allows one to kick the pulsars sufficiently for slightly smaller neutrino masses, between 2 and 10 keV, and larger mixing angles up to sin2θ ∼ ×10−7.”
Sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2018, background): “ng should remain within the observational limit [410,411]. Finally, a number of astrophysical tests have been proposed in the literature: Possible eects on supernova explosions [412{420]. In refs. [413,414] it has been proposed that sterile neutrinos may help to explain the motion of pulsars. The au”
Flavor structures of charged fermions and massive neutrinos (2019, background): “Note also that this kind of DM may not only suppress the formation of dwarf galaxies and other small-scale structures but also have impacts on the X-ray spectrum, the velocity distribution of pulsars and the formation of the first stars [608, 609].”
Multidimensional supernova simulations with approximative neutrino transport. I. Neutron star kicks and the anisotropy of neutrino-driven explosions in two spatial dimensions (2006, background): “…1996; Goldreich et al. 1996; Lai & Goldreich 2000), strong magnetic fields (Wheeler et al. 2002; Kotake et al. 2004), anisotropic neutrino emission associated with exotic neutrino properties (e.g. Fryer & Kusenko 2006; Fuller et al. 2003), or jets (Cen 1998; Khokhlov et al. 1999; Lai et al. 2001).”
The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos (2013, background): “Sterile neutrinos with keV masses can also help to explain the high rotation velocities of pulsars [373, 374].”