Cosmological Implications of Light Sterile Neutrinos produced after the QCD Phase Transition

Abstract

We study the production of sterile neutrinos in the early universe from $\pi \to l{\nu }_s$ shortly after the QCD phase transition in the absence of a lepton asymmetry while including finite temperature corrections to the $\pi$ mass and decay constant $f_{\pi }$. Sterile neutrinos with masses $\lesssim 1MeV$ produced via this mechanism freeze-out at $T_f\simeq 10MeV$ with a distribution function that is highly non-thermal and features a sharp enhancement at low momentum thereby making this species \emph{cold} even for very light masses. Dark matter abundance constraints from the CMB and phase space density constraints from the most dark matter dominated dwarf spheroidal galaxies provide upper and lower bounds respectively on combinations of mass and mixing angles. For $\pi \to \mu {\nu }_s$, the bounds lead to a narrow region of compatibility with the latest results from the $3.55\mathrm{KeV}$ line. The non-thermal distribution function leads to free-streaming lengths (today) in the range of $\sim \mbox{few kpc}$ consistent with the observation of cores in dwarf galaxies. For sterile neutrinos with mass $\lesssim 1eV$ that are produced by this reaction, the most recent accelerator and astrophysical bounds on $U_{ls}$ combined with the non-thermal distribution function suggests a substantial contribution from these sterile neutrinos to $N_{eff}$.

32 pages, 8 figures, new references and corrected typos

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• New Constraints on Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter from $NuSTAR$ M31 Observations
• Cold keV dark matter from decays and scatterings
• keV Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter from Singlet Scalar Decays: Basic Concepts and Subtle Features
• keV Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter from Singlet Scalar Decays: The Most General Case
• Warm Dark Matter Constraints Using Milky-Way Satellite Observations and Subhalo Evolution Modeling
• The surprising influence of late charged current weak interactions on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Production of heavy sterile neutrinos from vector boson decay at electroweak temperatures
• A short survey of matter-antimatter evolution in the primordial universe
• Warm Dark Matter from Higher-Dimensional Gauge Theories