Constraining Feeble Neutrino Interactions with Ultralight Dark Matter

Abstract

If ultralight $(\ll$ eV), bosonic dark matter couples to right handed neutrinos, active neutrino masses and mixing angles depend on the ambient dark matter density. When the neutrino Majorana mass, induced by the dark matter background, is small compared to the Dirac mass, neutrinos are "pseudo-Dirac" fermions that undergo oscillations between nearly degenerate active and sterile states. We present a complete cosmological history for such a scenario and find severe limits from a variety of terrestrial and cosmological observables. For scalar masses in the "fuzzy" dark matter regime ($\sim 10^{-20}$ eV), these limits exclude couplings of order $10^{-30}$, corresponding to Yukawa interactions comparable to the gravitational force between neutrinos and surpassing equivalent limits on time variation in scalar-induced electron and proton couplings.

9 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (6)

• Solar neutrino measurements in Super-Kamiokande-II
• Non-adiabatic Level Crossing in Resonant Neutrino Oscillations
• The Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background
• Neutrino Oscillations as a Probe of Light Scalar Dark Matter
• Pseudo-Dirac Neutrinos in the New Standard Model
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Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Sterile Neutrino Shape-shifting Caused by Dark Matter
• Probing the Local Dark Matter Halo with Neutrino Oscillations
• European Spallation Source as a searching tool for an ultralight scalar field
• Black Holes as Fermion Factories
• Probing Long-Range Forces Between Neutrinos with Cosmic Structures
• Cosmogenic neutrinos as probes of new physics
• Exploring Ultralight Scalar Assistance in Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter: Cold Spectrum and Unusual X/Gamma-ray Signatures
• Direct Detection of Ultralight Dark Matter via Charged Lepton Flavor Violation