Limits on the Radiative Decay of Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter from the Unresolved Cosmic and Soft X-ray Backgrounds

Abstract

We present upper limits on line emission in the Cosmic X-ray background (CXB) that would be produced by decay of sterile neutrino dark matter. We employ the spectra of the unresolved component of the CXB in the Chandra Deep Fields North and South obtained with the Chandra CCD detector in the E=0.8-9 keV band. The expected decay flux comes from the dark matter on the lines of sight through the Milky Way galactic halo. Our constraints on the sterile neutrino decay rate are sensitive to the modeling of the Milky Way halo. The highest halo mass estimates provide a limit on the sterile neutrino mass of m_s<2.9 keV in the Dodelson-Widrow production model, while the lowest halo mass estimates provide the conservative limit of m_s<5.7 keV (2-sigma). We also discuss constraints from a short observation of the softer (E<1 keV) X-ray background with a rocket-borne calorimeter by McCammon and collaborators.

8 pages, 4 figures, v2: matches version to appear in Phys. Rev. D

References in corpus (1)

• Dark matter sterile neutrinos in stellar collapse: alteration of energy/lepton number transport and a mechanism for supernova explosion enhancement

Cited by in corpus (18)

• How to find neutral leptons of the nuMSM?
• Dark-matter sterile neutrinos in models with a gauge singlet in the Higgs sector
• A lower bound on the mass of Dark Matter particles
• Sterile neutrino dark matter as a consequence of nuMSM-induced lepton asymmetry
• Realistic sterile neutrino dark matter with keV mass does not contradict cosmological bounds
• Constraints on decaying Dark Matter from XMM-Newton observations of M31
• Strong Upper Limits on Sterile Neutrino Warm Dark Matter
• Search for the light dark matter with an X-ray spectrometer
• Small-scale structure formation properties of chilled sterile neutrinos as dark matter
• Sterile neutrinos as subdominant warm dark matter
• Probing the nature of dark matter with Cosmic X-rays: Constraints from "Dark blobs" and grating spectra of galaxy clusters
• Delayed pulsar kicks from the emission of sterile neutrinos
• Sterile neutrino dark matter in warped extra dimensions
• Production of a sterile species via active-sterile mixing: an exactly solvable model
• Constraints on non-thermal Dark Matter from Planck lensing extraction
• Unsterile-Active Neutrino Mixing: Consequences on Radiative Decay and Bounds from the X-ray Background
• Bounds on Light Dark Matter
• Production of a sterile species: quantum kinetics