New production mechanism for keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter by decays of frozen-in scalars
By A. Merle, V. Niro, D. Schmidt. 2013
135 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We propose a new production mechanism for keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter. In our setting, we assume the existence of a scalar singlet particle which never entered thermal equilibrium in the early Universe, since it only couples to the Standard Model fields by a really small Higgs portal interaction. For suitable values of this coupling, the scalar can undergo the so-called freeze-in process, and in this way be efficiently produced in the early Universe. These scalars can then decay into keV sterile neutrinos and produce the correct Dark Matter abundance. While similar settings in which the scalar does enter thermal equilibrium and then freezes out have been studied previously, the mechanism proposed here is new and represents a versatile extension of the known case. We perform a detailed numerical calculation of the DM production using a set of coupled Boltzmann equations, and we illustrate the successful regions in the parameter space. Our production mechanism notably can even work in models where active-sterile mixing is completely absent.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9d86c9c8a82fb0e3ea3b76cc2e587245490117d
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- M. Drewes
- Alexey Boyarsky
- Oleg Ruchayskiy
- M. Viel
- N. Palanque-Delabrouille
- Julien Lesgourgues
- S. Pastor
- Julien Baur
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- The Dawn of FIMP Dark Matter: A Review of Models and Constraints (2017, background): “t studies have considered similar scenarios where the scalar seither decays into sterile neutrinos while in equilibrium [271,280,283,285,306,340,354{363], or where it rst undergoes a freeze-in itself [271,279,281{285,330,354,358,361,362]. Recently, sterile neutrinos undergoing or related to freeze-i”
- A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, background): “For detailed comments on this assumption, see [676, 730] and references therein.”