No Arabic abstract
We investigate how hypothetical particles - sterile neutrinos - can be produced in the interior of exploding supernovae via the resonant conversion of $bar u_mu$ and $bar u_tau$. The novelty of our treatment lies in the proper account of the resulting lepton number diffusion. We compute the yield of sterile neutrinos and find that even after taking into account back reaction, sterile neutrinos can carry out a sizeable fraction of the total energy of the explosion comparable to that of active neutrinos. The production is, however, exponentially sensitive to the temperature in the inner supernovae regions, making robust predictions of challenging. In order to understand whether this production affects supernova evolution and can therefore be constrained, detailed simulations including the effects of sterile neutrinos are needed.
Sterile neutrinos are natural extensions to the standard model of particle physics in neutrino mass generation mechanisms. If they are relatively light, less than approximately 10 keV, they can alter cosmology significantly, from the early Universe to the matter and radiation energy density today. Here, we review the cosmological role such light sterile neutrinos can play from the early Universe, including production of keV-scale sterile neutrinos as dark matter candidates, and dynamics of light eV-scale sterile neutrinos during the weakly-coupled active neutrino era. We review proposed signatures of light sterile neutrinos in cosmic microwave background and large scale structure data. We also discuss keV-scale sterile neutrino dark matter decay signatures in X-ray observations, including recent candidate $sim$3.5 keV X-ray line detections consistent with the decay of a $sim$7 keV sterile neutrino dark matter particle.
We study the phenomenology of a keV sterile neutrino in a supersymmetric model with $U(1)_R-$ lepton number in the light of a very recent observation of an X-ray line signal at around 3.5 keV, detected in the X-ray spectra of Andromeda galaxy and various galaxy clusters including the Perseus galaxy cluster. This model not only provides a small tree level mass to one of the active neutrinos but also renders a suitable warm dark matter candidate in the form of a sterile neutrino with negligible active-sterile mixing. Light neutrino masses and mixing can be explained once one-loop radiative corrections are taken into account. The scalar sector of this model can accommodate a Higgs boson with a mass of $sim$ 125 GeV. In this model gravitino is the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) and we also study the cosmological implications of this light gravitino with mass $sim mathcal O$(GeV).
Heavy sterile neutrinos with masses ${mathcal O}(100)$ MeV mixing with active neutrinos can be produced in the core of a collapsing supernova (SN). In order to avoid an excessive energy loss, shortening the observed duration of the SN 1987A neutrino burst, we show that the active-sterile neutrino mixing angle should satisfy $sin^2 theta lesssim 5 times 10^{-7}$. For a mixing with tau flavour, this bound is much stronger than the ones from laboratory searches. Moreover, we show that in the viable parameter space the decay of such heavy sterile neutrinos in the SN envelope would lead to a very energetic flux of daughter active neutrinos; if not too far below current limits, this would be detectable in large underground neutrino observatories, like Super-Kamiokande, as a (slightly time-delayed) high-energy bump in the spectrum of a forthcoming Galactic SN event.
We have made core-collapse supernova simulations that allow oscillations between electron neutrinos (or their anti particles) with right-handed sterile neutrinos. We have considered a range of mixing angles and sterile neutrino masses including those consistent with sterile neutrinos as a dark matter candidate. We examine whether such oscillations can impact the core bounce and shock reheating in supernovae. We identify the optimum ranges of mixing angles and masses that can dramatically enhance the supernova explosion by efficiently transporting electron anti-neutrinos from the core to behind the shock where they provide additional heating leading to much larger explosion kinetic energies. We show that this effect can cause stars to explode that otherwise would have collapsed. We find that an interesting periodicity in the neutrino luminosity develops due to a cycle of depletion of the neutrino density by conversion to sterile neutrinos that shuts off the conversion, followed by a replenished neutrino density as neutrinos transport through the core.
We develop the consequences of introducing a purely leptonic, lepton number violating non-standard interaction (NSI) and standard model neutrino mixing with a fourth, sterile neutrino in the analysis of short-baseline, neutrino experiments. We focus on the muon decay at rest (DAR) result from the Liquid Scintillation Neutrino Experiment (LSND) and the Karlsruhe and Rutherford Medium Energy Neutrino Experiment (KARMEN). We make a comprehensive analysis of lepton number violating, NSI effective operators and find nine that affect muon decay relevant to LSND results. Two of these preserve the standard model (SM) value 3/4 for the Michel rho and delta parameters and, overall, show favorable agreement with precision data and the electron anti-neutrino signal from LSND data. We display theoretical models that lead to these two effective operators. In the model we choose to apply to DAR data, both electron anti-neutrino appearance from muon anti-neutrino oscillation and electron anti-neutrino survival after production from NSI decay of the positive muon contribute to the expected signal. This is a unique feature of our scheme. We find a range of parameters where both experiments can be accommodated consistently with recent global, sterile neutrino fits to short baseline data. We comment on implications of the models for new physics searches at colliders and comment on further implications of the lepton number violating interactions plus sterile neutrino-standard model neutrino mixing.