Background radiation from sterile neutrino decay and reionization

Abstract

Sterile neutrinos are one of the most promising Warm Dark Matter candidates. By considering their radiative- and pion-decay channels, we derive the allowed contribution of sterile neutrinos to the X-ray, optical and near-infrared cosmic backgrounds. The X-ray background puts a strong constraint on the mass of radiatively decaying neutrinos (m <= 14 keV), whereas the allowed mass range for pion-decay neutrinos (for a particle lifetime > 4 X 10^17 s) is 150 <= m/MeV <= 500. Taking into account these constraints, we find that sterile neutrinos do not significantly contribute to the optical and near-infrared background. We further consider the impact of sterile neutrinos on reionization. We find that the Thomson optical depth due to sterile neutrinos is tau_e = (0.4-3) X 10^-2 in the case of radiative decays, and it is ~10^-3 for the pion-decay channel. We conclude that these particles must have played only a minor role in cosmic reionization history.

13 pages, 9 figures, replaced with revised version, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (2)

• Experimental Constraints on Self-consistent Reionization Models
• Population III and the Near-Infrared Background Excess

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