keV sterile neutrino dark matter in gauge extensions of the standard model

By Fedor Bezrukov, H. Hettmansperger, Manfred Lindner. 2009

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is known, that a keV scale sterile neutrino is a good warm dark matter candidate. We study how this possibility could be realized in the context of gauge extensions of the standard model. The naieve expectation leads to large thermal overproduction of sterile neutrinos in this setup. However, we find that it is possible to use out-of-equilibrium decay of the other right-handed neutrinos of the model to dilute the present density of the keV sterile neutrinos and achieve the observed dark matter density. We present the universal requirements that should be satisfied by the gauge extensions of the standard model, containing right-handed neutrinos, to be viable models of warm dark matter, and provide a simple example in the context of the left-right symmetric model.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c018dc4d9d89d189f8b70de60f26ecf2045085d3

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Citations in the corpus

Warm dark matter in low scale left-right theory (2012, methodology): “The main obstacle we have to face when MWR lies in the TeV region, turns out to be the over-abundance of N1 [25, 31], because the SU(2)R gauge interactions keep it in thermal equilibrium when the temperature is high.”
A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, methodology): “When supersymmetrizing the Standard Model (SM), an extra Higgs doublet must be introduced and then the particle content must be doubled.”
Cosmological constraints on exotic injection of electromagnetic energy (2016, unknown): “As long as the sterile neutrino (νs) mass is below ∼ 1MeV, the only channels open are [55] • νs → 3ν, with Γ3ν ' G 2 FM 5 sΘ 2 192π3 ' [ 3× 104 s ( MeV Ms )5 Θ−2 ]−1 ;”
Sterile neutrinos in cosmology (2017, background): “Another class of models involve mirror sector [81, 82] or left-right symmetric models [83, 84] which in some cases can provide light eV-scale sterile neutrinos as well as the keV scale dark matter sterile neutrino [85].”
Constraints from Ly-α forests on non-thermal dark matter including resonantly-produced sterile neutrinos (2017, background): “Additional production mechanisms exist (see [26]) including production from the decay of a scalar field [27–29] and diluted thermal overproduction [30, 31] to name just a few.”
Neutrinoless double beta decay versus other probes of heavy sterile neutrinos (2019, background): “This constraint can naturally be evaded in exotic models [147–150], for example those that inject additional entropy and dilute the dark matter (DM) energy density.”
A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, methodology): “In [671, 673] entropy dilution was achieved in the context of Left-Right symmetric extensions of the SM.”
The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos (2013, background): “Such additional interactions would contribute to the thermal production [541] in the early universe.”
New production mechanism for keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter by decays of frozen-in scalars (2013, background): “For example, the keV sterile neutrino cannot be produced from the thermal plasma only: in case it enters thermal equilibrium, it is typically overproduced since it is relativistic at freeze-out [48, 49].”
Dark Matter, Baryogenesis and Neutrino Oscillations from Right Handed Neutrinos (2012, background): “Some ideas on the origin of a low seesaw scale can be found in [60–71], see also [72].”