No Arabic abstract
We explore the complementarity between terrestrial neutrino oscillation experiments and astrophysical/cosmological measurements in probing the existence of sterile neutrinos. We find that upcoming accelerator neutrino experiments will not improve on constraints by the time they are operational, but that reactor experiments can already probe parameter space beyond the reach of Planck. We emphasize the tension between cosmological experiments and reactor antineutrino experiments and enumerate several possibilities for resolving this tension.
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 consider the possibility of the lightest sterile neutrino dark matter which has dipole interaction with heavier sterile neutrinos. The lifetime can be long enough to be a dark matter candidate without violating other constraints and the correct amount of relic abundance can be produced in the early Universe. We find that a sterile neutrino with the mass of around MeV and the dimension-five non-renormalisable dipole interaction suppressed by $Lambda_5 gtrsim 10^{15}$ GeV can be a good candidate of dark matter, while heavier sterile neutrinos with masses of the order of GeV can explain the active neutrino oscillations.
We review sterile neutrinos as possible Dark Matter candidates. After a short summary on the role of neutrinos in cosmology and particle physics, we give a comprehensive overview of the current status of the research on sterile neutrino Dark Matter. First we discuss the motivation and limits obtained through astrophysical observations. Second, we review different mechanisms of how sterile neutrino Dark Matter could have been produced in the early universe. Finally, we outline a selection of future laboratory searches for keV-scale sterile neutrinos, highlighting their experimental challenges and discovery potential.
The experimental bound on lifetime of nu_3, the neutrino mass eigenstate with the smallest nu_e component, is much weaker than those of nu_1 and nu_2 by many orders of magnitude to which the astrophysical constraints apply. We argue that the future reactor neutrino oscillation experiments with medium-baseline (~ 50 km), such as JUNO or RENO-50, has the best chance of placing the most stringent constraint on nu_3 lifetime among all neutrino experiments which utilize the artificial source neutrinos. Assuming decay into invisible states, we show by a detailed chi^2 analysis that the nu_3 lifetime divided by its mass, tau_3/m_3, can be constrained to be tau_3/m_3 > 7.5 (5.5) x 10^{-11} s/eV at 95% (99%) C.L. by 100 kt.years exposure by JUNO. It may be further improved to the level comparable to the atmospheric neutrino bound by its longer run. We also discuss to what extent nu_3 decay affects mass-ordering determination and precision measurements of the mixing parameters.
Extending the Standard Model with three right-handed neutrinos and a simple QCD axion sector can account for neutrino oscillations, dark matter and baryon asymmetry; at the same time, it solves the strong CP problem, stabilizes the electroweak vacuum and can implement critical Higgs inflation (satisfying all current observational bounds). We perform here a general analysis of dark matter (DM) in such a model, which we call the $a u$MSM. Although critical Higgs inflation features a (quasi) inflection point of the inflaton potential we show that DM cannot receive a contribution from primordial black holes in the $a u$MSM. This leads to a multicomponent axion-sterile-neutrino DM and allows us to relate the axion parameters, such as the axion decay constant, to the neutrino parameters. We include several DM production mechanisms: the axion production via misalignment and decay of topological defects as well as the sterile-neutrino production through the resonant and non-resonant mechanisms and in the recently proposed CPT-symmetric universe.