Sterile neutrinos in cosmology

By K. Abazajian. 2017

246 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sterile neutrinos are natural extensions to the standard model of particle physics in neutrino mass generation mechanisms. If they are relatively light, less than approximately 10 keV, they can alter cosmology significantly, from the early Universe to the matter and radiation energy density today. Here, we review the cosmological role such light sterile neutrinos can play from the early Universe, including production of keV-scale sterile neutrinos as dark matter candidates, and dynamics of light eV-scale sterile neutrinos during the weakly-coupled active neutrino era. We review proposed signatures of light sterile neutrinos in cosmic microwave background and large scale structure data. We also discuss keV-scale sterile neutrino dark matter decay signatures in X-ray observations, including recent candidate $\sim$3.5 keV X-ray line detections consistent with the decay of a $\sim$7 keV sterile neutrino dark matter particle.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7fd228babe80926184a4b4a4662a7fbcce1cd2d

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

The Forward Physics Facility: Sites, experiments, and physics potential (2021, background): “nother scenario with a mediator mass below the weak scale has been proposed to address the relic density of the sterile eutrino DM [139–141], which otherwise is in severe tension with existing constraints [142].”
WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, background): “ produced in the early Universe being not in thermal equilibrium, hence their eect on the structure formation needs to be studied in detail before drawing robust conclusions (for a recent review see [56]). An array of these and related arguments have led to establishing a popular (and sensible) para”
Neutrinoless double beta decay versus other probes of heavy sterile neutrinos (2019, background): “With lifetimes longer than the current age of the Universe these sterile states are viable DM candidates if efficiently produced [119, 152, 153].”
Constraints on Dark Matter Microphysics from the Milky Way Satellite Population (2019, background): “Non-standard DM scenarios, such as warm DM (WDM; Abazajian 2017; Adhikari et al. 2017) and fuzzy DM (FDM; Hu et al. 2000; Hui et al. 2017), often involve smoothing of matter perturbations and suppression of structure on small scales.”
History of dark matter (2018, unknown): “In particular, reports of a 3.55 keV line observed from a collection of galaxy clusters (Boyarsky et al., 2014; Bulbul et al., 2014) have recently received a great deal of attention within the context of a decaying sterile neutrino (Abazajian, 2017).”