Visible sterile neutrinos as the earliest relic probes of cosmology

Gelmini, Graciela B.; Lu, Philip; Takhistov, Volodymyr

doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2019.135113

Cited by 31 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 80 publications

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“…We consider here the same constraints and regions of interest in the mass-mixing plane for resonantly produced sterile neutrinos in different pre-BBN cosmologies as we considered in our previous study of non-resonant production [50,51], modifying the relic density and characteristic momentum as necessary. The difference in the sterile neutrino production mechanism only affects the limits that depend on these quantities.…”

Section: Constraints and Regions Of Interestmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cosmological dependence of non-resonantly produced sterile neutrinos

Gelmini¹,

Lu²,

Takhistov³

2019

J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.

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The detection of a sterile neutrino could constitute the first observation of a particle that could have been produced before Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), and could provide information about the yet untested pre-BBN era. The cosmological evolution in this era could be drastically different than typically assumed, in what constitutes the standard cosmology, as happens in a variety of motivated particle models. In this work we assess the sensitivity to different pre-BBN cosmologies in which entropy is conserved of 0.01 eV to 1 MeV mass sterile neutrinos produced in the early Universe via resonant active-sterile oscillations, which requires a large lepton asymmetry. We identify mass ranges where it is possible to have two populations of the same sterile neutrino, one with a colder and one with a hotter momentum spectra, which is in principle an observable effect. Furthermore, we show the regions in mass and mixing where fully resonant production (i.e. simultaneously coherent and adiabatic) can occur. We find that in all the cosmologies we consider, including the standard one, fully resonantly produced sterile neutrinos in the eV-mass range can evade all cosmological constraints.In the absence of a large lepton asymmetry the oscillations are non-resonant and sterile neutrinos are produced via the Dodelson-Widrow (DW) mechanism [45]. In the standard cosmology this mechanism results in a Fermi-Dirac relic momentum distribution of sterile neutrinos, with a reduced magnitude with respect to active neutrinos. Several studies have already been carried out on non-resonantly produced sterile neutrinos in different pre-BBN cosmologies ). This work is complementary to these previous studies in that we concentrate on the production of sterile neutrinos via resonant active-sterile oscillations, an often considered production mechanism that requires a significant lepton asymmetry in active neutrinos (this is the Shi-Fuller mechanism [52], see also Ref. [53,54]). In this case, sterile neutrinos are produced with a colder momentum distribution (i.e. with a lower average momentum) that is different from a Fermi-Dirac spectrum, even in the standard cosmology. In particular, we study the effect of different cosmologies on resonantly produced sterile neutrinos with mass 10 −2 eV < m s < 1 MeV. Since the production rate is usually not fast enough for sterile neutrinos to equilibrate, the final relic abundance and spectrum are fixed by freeze-in.We will analyze resonant sterile neutrino production within several example cosmological models in which entropy is conserved, characterized by the magnitude and temperature dependence of the Hubble expansion rate H in the non-standard cosmological phase. If H is larger than it would be in the standard cosmology, the resonant production of sterile neutrinos during this phase is suppressed with respect to standard production, and if H is lower, the production is enhanced. If the production is fully resonant, which requires adiabaticity and coherence at the resonance, the relic sterile neutrino ...

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Section: Constraints and Regions Of Interestmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cosmological dependence of non-resonantly produced sterile neutrinos

Gelmini¹,

Lu²,

Takhistov³

2019

J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.

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“…This makes it possible to circumvent the well-known ∼100 TeV upper limit on the mass of the DM, based on partial wave unitarity [414] (for related scenarios, see Refs. [415,416,417,341,418,295,278,419,227,420,421,422,39,261,282,423,284,424,288,265,425,426,289,301,300,427,428,429,430,431,432,433,302,434,435,436,437,438,439,290]; for alternative "freeze-in" production of DM in scenarios with a nonstandard expansion phase, see Refs. [440,441,425,442,443,426,289,…”

Section: Consequences For Dark Matter (Authors: a Berlin D Hooper And G Krnjaic)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The First Three Seconds: a Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the Early Universe

Allahverdi¹,

Amin²,

Berlin³

et al. 2021

TheOJA

200

140

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It is commonly assumed that the energy density of the Universe was dominated by radiation between reheating after inflation and the onset of matter domination 54,000 years later. While the abundance of light elements indicates that the Universe was radiation dominated during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), there is scant evidence that the Universe was radiation dominated prior to BBN. It is therefore possible that the cosmological history was more complicated, with deviations from the standard radiation domination during the earliest epochs. Indeed, several interesting proposals regarding various topics such as the generation of dark matter, matter-antimatter asymmetry, gravitational waves, primordial black holes, or microhalos during a nonstandard expansion phase have been recently made. In this paper, we review various possible causes and consequences of deviations from radiation domination in the early Universe -taking place either before or after BBN -and the constraints on them, as they have been discussed in the literature during the recent years.

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“…Sterile neutrinos as a warm DM with masses at keV scale may constitute all or a part of galactic DM halo [56,[56][57][58][59][60][61]. They can satisfy the bounds from structure formation and the free streaming length of DM at early epochs [55,57,60], and also explain the deviation of number of effective neutrinos measured from cosmic microwave background (CMB) [55,62]. Moreover, the presence of sterile neutrinos might explain the baryon asymmetry of the Universe [63,64].…”

Section: Jhep12(2020)194mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The parameter ∆N eff is constrained by CMB [118]. Its exact value in our scenario also depends on the cosmic history before the big bang nucleosynthesis and after the inflationary era [55,62] which is unknown then we will not consider its computation here.…”

Section: Jhep12(2020)194mentioning

confidence: 99%

Shedding new light on sterile neutrinos from XENON1T experiment

Shakeri

Hajkarim

Xue

2020

J. High Energ. Phys.

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The XENON1T collaboration recently reported the excess of events from recoil electrons, possibly giving an insight into new area beyond the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. We try to explain this excess by considering effective interactions between the sterile neutrinos and the SM particles. In this paper, we present an effective model based on one-particle-irreducible interaction vertices at low energies that are induced from the SM gauge symmetric four-fermion operators at high energies. The effective interaction strength is constrained by the SM precision measurements, astrophysical and cosmological observations. We introduce a novel effective electromagnetic interaction between sterile neutrinos and SM neutrinos, which can successfully explain the XENON1T event rate through inelastic scattering of the sterile neutrino dark matter from Xenon electrons. We find that sterile neutrinos with masses around 90 keV and specific effective coupling can fit well with the XENON1T data where the best fit points preserving DM constraints and possibly describe the anomalies in other experiments.

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Visible sterile neutrinos as the earliest relic probes of cosmology

Cited by 31 publications

References 80 publications

Cosmological dependence of non-resonantly produced sterile neutrinos

Cosmological dependence of non-resonantly produced sterile neutrinos

The First Three Seconds: a Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the Early Universe

Shedding new light on sterile neutrinos from XENON1T experiment

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