Production of unstable heavy neutrinos in proto-neutron stars

Abstract

We discuss the production of a class of heavy sterile neutrinos ${\nu }_h$ in proto-neutron stars. The neutrinos, of mass around $50$ MeV, have a negligible mixing with the active species but relatively large dimension-5 electromagnetic couplings. In particular, a magnetic dipole moment $\mu \approx 10^{-6}$ GeV${}^{-1}$ implies that they are thermally produced through $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to {\bar{\nu }}_h{\nu }_h$ in the early phase of the core collapse, whereas a heavy--light transition moment ${\mu }_{\mathrm{tr}}\approx 10^{-8}$ GeV${}^{-1}$ allows their decay ${\nu }_h\to {\nu }_i\gamma$ with a lifetime around $10^{-3}$ s. This type of electromagnetic couplings has been recently proposed to explain the excess of electron-like events in baseline experiments. We show that the production and decay of these heavy neutrinos would transport energy from the central regions of the star to distances $d\approx 400$ km, providing a very efficient mechanism to enhance the supernova shock front and heat the material behind it.

arXiv comment13 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• The Present and Future Status of Heavy Neutral Leptons
• An Extended Analysis of Heavy Neutral Leptons during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Constraining self-interacting fermionic dark matter in admixed neutron stars using multimessenger astronomy
• Heavy sterile neutrinos in stellar core-collapse