In these brief lecture notes, we introduce sterile neutrinos as dark matter candidates. We discuss in particular their production via oscillations, their radiative decay, as well as possible observational signatures and constraints.
Neutrinos, being the only fermions in the Standard Model of Particle Physics that do not possess electromagnetic or color charges, have the unique opportunity to communicate with fermions outside the Standard Model through mass mixing. Such Standard
Model-singlet fermions are generally referred to as sterile neutrinos. In this review article, we discuss the theoretical and experimental motivation for sterile neutrinos, as well as their phenomenological consequences. With the benefit of hindsight in 2020, we point out potentially viable and interesting ideas. We focus in particular on sterile neutrinos that are light enough to participate in neutrino oscillations, but we also comment on the benefits of introducing heavier sterile states. We discuss the phenomenology of eV-scale sterile neutrinos in terrestrial experiments and in cosmology, we survey the global data, and we highlight various intriguing anomalies. We also expose the severe tension that exists between different data sets and prevents a consistent interpretation of the global data in at least the simplest sterile neutrino models. We discuss non-minimal scenarios that may alleviate some of this tension. We briefly review the status of keV-scale sterile neutrinos as dark matter and the possibility of explaining the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe through leptogenesis driven by yet heavier sterile neutrinos.
We investigate the sensitivity of the FASER$ u$ detector to new physics in the form of non-standard neutrino interactions. FASER$ u$, which has recently been installed 480 m downstream of the ATLAS interaction point, will for the first time study int
eractions of multi-TeV neutrinos from a controlled source. Our formalism -- which is applicable to any current and future neutrino experiment -- is based on the Standard Model Effective Theory~(SMEFT) and its counterpart, Weak Effective Field Theory~(WEFT), below the electroweak scale. Starting from the WEFT Lagrangian, we compute the coefficients that modify neutrino production in meson decays and detection via deep-inelastic scattering, and we express the new physics effects in terms of modified flavor transition probabilities. For some coupling structures, we find that FASER$ u$ will be able to constrain interactions that are two to three orders of magnitude weaker than Standard Model weak interactions, implying that the experiment will be indirectly probing new physics at the multi-TeV scale. In some cases, FASER$ u$ constraints will become comparable to existing limits - some of them derived for the first time in this paper - already with $150~$fb${}^{-1}$ of data.
We discuss the possibility of forming primordial black holes during a first-order phase transition in the early Universe. As is well known, such a phase transition proceeds through the formation of true-vacuum bubbles in a Universe that is still in a
false vacuum. When there is a particle species whose mass increases significantly during the phase transition, transmission of the corresponding particles through the advancing bubble walls is suppressed. Consequently, an overdensity can build up in front of the walls and become sufficiently large to trigger primordial black hole formation. We track this process quantitatively by solving a Boltzmann equation, and we determine the resulting black hole density and mass distribution as a function of model parameters.
We discuss neutrino magnetic moments as a way of constraining physics beyond the Standard Model. In fact, new physics at the TeV scale can easily generate observable neutrino magnetic moments, and there exists a multitude of ways of probing them. We
highlight in particular direct dark matter detection experiments (which are sensitive to neutrino magnetic moments because of the predicted modifications to the solar neutrino scattering rate), stellar cooling, and cosmological constraints.
We revisit the physics of neutrino magnetic moments, focusing in particular on the case where the right-handed, or sterile, neutrinos are heavier (up to several MeV) than the left-handed Standard Model neutrinos. The discussion is centered around the
idea of detecting an upscattering event mediated by a transition magnetic moment in a neutrino or dark matter experiment. Considering neutrinos from all known sources, as well as including all available data from XENON1T and Borexino, we derive the strongest up-to-date exclusion limits on the active-to-sterile neutrino transition magnetic moment. We then study complementary constraints from astrophysics and cosmology, performing, in particular, a thorough analysis of BBN. We find that these data sets scrutinize most of the relevant parameter space. Explaining the XENON1T excess with transition magnetic moments is marginally possible if conservative assumptions are adopted regarding the supernova 1987A and CMB constraints. Finally, we discuss model-building challenges that arise in scenarios that feature large magnetic moments while keeping neutrino masses well below 1 eV. We present a successful ultraviolet-complete model of this type based on TeV-scale leptoquarks, establishing links with muon magnetic moment, B physics anomalies, and collider searches at the LHC.
Although many galaxies in the Virgo cluster are known to have lost significant amounts of HI gas, only about a dozen features are known where the HI extends significantly outside its parent galaxy. Previous numerical simulations have predicted that H
I removed by ram pressure stripping should have column densities far in excess of the sensitivity limits of observational surveys. We construct a simple model to try and quantify how many streams we might expect to detect. This accounts for the expected random orientation of the streams in position and velocity space as well as the expected stream length and mass of stripped HI. Using archival data from the Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey, we search for any streams which might previously have been missed in earlier analyses. We report the confident detection of ten streams as well as sixteen other less sure detections. We show that these well-match our analytic predictions for which galaxies should be actively losing gas, however the mass of the streams is typically far below the amount of missing HI in their parent galaxies, implying that a phase change and/or dispersal renders the gas undetectable. By estimating the orbital timescales we estimate that dissolution rates of 1-10 Msolar/yr are able to explain both the presence of a few long, massive streams and the greater number of shorter, less massive features.
We explore a novel search strategy for dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) such as primordial black holes or dense mini-halos in the mass range from $10^{-4}$ to 0.1 solar masses. These objects can gravitationally lens th
e signal of fast radio bursts (FRBs), producing a characteristic interference pattern in the frequency spectrum, similar to the previously studied femtolensing signal in gamma ray burst spectra. Unlike traditional searches using microlensing, FRB lensing will probe the abundance of MACHOs at cosmological distance scales (~Gpc) rather than just their distribution in the neighborhood of the Milky Way. The method is thus particularly relevant for dark mini-halos, which may be inaccessible to microlensing due to their finite spatial extent or tidal disruption in galaxies. We find that the main complication in FRB lensing will be interstellar scintillation in the FRBs host galaxy and in the Milky Way. Scintillation is difficult to quantify because it heavily depends on turbulence in the interstellar medium, which is poorly understood. We show that, nevertheless, for realistic scintillation parameters, FRB lensing can set competitive limits on compact dark matter object, and we back our findings with explicit simulations.
We are carrying out a sensitive blind survey for neutral hydrogen (HI) in the Virgo cluster and report here on the first 5deg x 1deg area covered, which includes two optically-dark gas features: the five-cloud ALFALFA Virgo 7 complex (Kent et al. 200
7, 2009) and the stripped tail of NGC 4522 (Kenney et al. 2004). We discover a sixth cloud and low velocity gas that extends the velocity range of the complex to over 450 km/s, find that around half of the total HI flux comes from extended emission rather than compact clouds, and see around 150 percent more gas, raising the total HI mass from 5.1 x 10$^8$ M$_odot$ to 1.3 x 10$^9$ M$_odot$. This makes the identification of NGC 4445 and NGC 4424 by Kent et al. (2009) as possible progenitors of the complex less likely, as it would require an unusually high fraction of the gas removed to have been preserved in the complex. We also identify a new component to the gas tail of NGC 4522 extending to ~200 km/s below the velocity range of the gas in the galaxy, pointing towards the eastern end of the complex. We consider the possibility that NGC 4522 may be the parent galaxy of the complex, but the large velocity separation (~1800 km/s) leads us to rule this out. We conclude that, in the absence of any better candidate, NGC 4445 remains the most likely parent galaxy, although this requires it to have been particularly gas-rich prior to the event that removed its gas into the complex.
Femtolensing of gamma ray bursts (GRBs) has been put forward as an exciting possibility to probe exotic astrophysical objects with masses below $10^{-13}$ solar masses such as small primordial black holes or ultra-compact dark matter minihalos, made
up for instance of QCD axions. In this paper we critically review this idea, properly taking into account the extended nature of the source as well as wave optics effects. We demonstrate that most GRBs are inappropriate for femtolensing searches due to their large sizes. This removes the previous femtolensing bounds on primordial black holes, implying that vast regions of parameter space for primordial black hole dark matter are not robustly constrained. Still, we entertain the possibility that a small fraction of GRBs, characterized by fast variability can have smaller sizes and be useful. However, a large number of such bursts would need to be observed to achieve meaningful constraints. We study the sensitivity of future observations as a function of the number of detected GRBs and of the size of the emission region.
