DOE PAGES title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Axion-assisted production of sterile neutrino dark matter

Abstract

Sterile neutrinos can be generated in the early universe through oscillations with active neutrinos and represent a popular and well-studied candidate for our Universe’s dark matter. Stringent constraints from X-ray and gamma-ray line searches, however, have excluded the simplest of such models. Here in this paper, we propose a novel alternative to the standard scenario in which the mixing angle between the sterile and active neutrinos is a dynamical quantity, induced through interactions with a light axionlike field. As the energy density of the axionlike particles is diluted by Hubble expansion, the degree of mixing is reduced at late times, suppressing the decay rate and easily alleviating any tension with X-ray or gamma-ray constraints. Lastly, we present a simple model which illustrates the phenomenology of this scenario, and also describe a framework in which the QCD axion is responsible for the production of sterile neutrinos in the early universe.

Authors:
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2]
  1. SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States); Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States). Enrico Fermi Inst.
  2. Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States). Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics; Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States). Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics; Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States). Kavli Inst. for Cosmological Physics (KICP)
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE
OSTI Identifier:
1360757
Alternate Identifier(s):
OSTI ID: 1351688
Grant/Contract Number:  
AC02-76SF00515; AC02-07CH11359
Resource Type:
Accepted Manuscript
Journal Name:
Physical Review D
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Volume: 95; Journal Issue: 7; Journal ID: ISSN 2470-0010
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS; 72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS

Citation Formats

Berlin, Asher, and Hooper, Dan. Axion-assisted production of sterile neutrino dark matter. United States: N. p., 2017. Web. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.95.075017.
Berlin, Asher, & Hooper, Dan. Axion-assisted production of sterile neutrino dark matter. United States. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.075017
Berlin, Asher, and Hooper, Dan. Wed . "Axion-assisted production of sterile neutrino dark matter". United States. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.075017. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1360757.
@article{osti_1360757,
title = {Axion-assisted production of sterile neutrino dark matter},
author = {Berlin, Asher and Hooper, Dan},
abstractNote = {Sterile neutrinos can be generated in the early universe through oscillations with active neutrinos and represent a popular and well-studied candidate for our Universe’s dark matter. Stringent constraints from X-ray and gamma-ray line searches, however, have excluded the simplest of such models. Here in this paper, we propose a novel alternative to the standard scenario in which the mixing angle between the sterile and active neutrinos is a dynamical quantity, induced through interactions with a light axionlike field. As the energy density of the axionlike particles is diluted by Hubble expansion, the degree of mixing is reduced at late times, suppressing the decay rate and easily alleviating any tension with X-ray or gamma-ray constraints. Lastly, we present a simple model which illustrates the phenomenology of this scenario, and also describe a framework in which the QCD axion is responsible for the production of sterile neutrinos in the early universe.},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevD.95.075017},
journal = {Physical Review D},
number = 7,
volume = 95,
place = {United States},
year = {Wed Apr 12 00:00:00 EDT 2017},
month = {Wed Apr 12 00:00:00 EDT 2017}
}

Journal Article:

Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 14 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

Save / Share:

Works referenced in this record:

Planck-scale physics and the Peccei-Quinn mechanism
journal, May 1992


Bounds on sterile neutrinos from nucleosynthesis
journal, March 1990


Sterile neutrinos as dark matter
journal, January 1994


Astrophysical constraints on resonantly produced sterile neutrino dark matter
journal, April 2016


Dark matter progenitor: Light vector boson decay into sterile neutrinos
journal, June 2014


Upper Bound on the Dark Matter Total Annihilation Cross Section
journal, December 2007


New Dark Matter Candidate: Nonthermal Sterile Neutrinos
journal, April 1999


Sterile Neutrinos, Dark Matter, and Pulsar Velocities in Models with a Higgs Singlet
journal, December 2006


Light singlet neutrinos and the primordial nucleosynthesis
journal, July 1990


Sterile neutrino dark matter and low scale leptogenesis from a charged scalar
journal, January 2015


New Target for Cosmic Axion Searches
journal, October 2016


Review of Particle Physics
journal, August 2014


Neutrino masses and sterile neutrino dark matter from the PeV scale
journal, December 2015


Strong Upper Limits on Sterile Neutrino Warm Dark Matter
journal, September 2008


Dark matter and observable lepton flavor violation
journal, December 2016


SN 1987A gamma-ray limits on the conversion of pseudoscalars
journal, September 1996


Dark-matter sterile neutrinos in models with a gauge singlet in the Higgs sector
journal, March 2008


New production mechanism for keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter by decays of frozen-in scalars
journal, March 2014

  • Merle, Alexander; Niro, Viviana; Schmidt, Daniel
  • Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2014, Issue 03
  • DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2014/03/028

Sterile neutrino dark matter bounds from galaxies of the Local Group
journal, January 2014


keV sterile neutrino dark matter from singlet scalar decays: basic concepts and subtle features
journal, June 2015


A fresh look at keV sterile neutrino dark matter from frozen-in scalars
journal, January 2015

  • Adulpravitchai, Adisorn; Schmidt, Michael A.
  • Journal of High Energy Physics, Vol. 2015, Issue 1
  • DOI: 10.1007/JHEP01(2015)006

Constraining dark matter properties with SPI
journal, July 2008


Updated search for spectral lines from Galactic dark matter interactions with pass 8 data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope
journal, June 2015


Neutrino Oscillations as a Probe of Light Scalar Dark Matter
journal, November 2016


Observational constraints on decoupled hidden sectors
journal, September 2016


Dodelson-Widrow production of sterile neutrino Dark Matter with non-trivial initial abundance
journal, April 2016

  • Merle, Alexander; Schneider, Aurel; Totzauer, Maximilian
  • Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 04
  • DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2016/04/003

μ→eγ at a rate of one out of 109 muon decays?
journal, April 1977


Sterile neutrino hot, warm, and cold dark matter
journal, May 2001


Neutrino Mass and Spontaneous Parity Nonconservation
journal, April 1980


Neutrino masses in SU(2) ⊗ U(1) theories
journal, November 1980


Sterile neutrino dark matter: Weak interactions in the strong coupling epoch
journal, August 2016

  • Venumadhav, Tejaswi; Cyr-Racine, Francis-Yan; Abazajian, Kevork N.
  • Physical Review D, Vol. 94, Issue 4
  • DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.94.043515

Sterile neutrino dark matter from freeze-in
journal, February 2016


Excess Astrophysical Photons from a 0.1–1 keV Cosmic Axion Background
journal, October 2013


Model-independent bound on the dark matter lifetime
journal, July 2008


A fresh look at linear cosmological constraints on a decaying Dark Matter component
journal, August 2016

  • Poulin, Vivian; Serpico, Pasquale D.; Lesgourgues, Julien
  • Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 08
  • DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2016/08/036

Radiative decays of massive neutrinos
journal, February 1982


Axion cosmology
journal, July 2016


Gamma Rays from SN 1987A due to Pseudoscalar Conversion
journal, September 1996


Baryon- and Lepton-Nonconserving Processes
journal, November 1979


A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter
journal, January 2017


Sterile neutrino dark matter in warped extra dimensions
journal, March 2008


Isocurvature constraints on portal couplings
journal, June 2016

  • Kainulainen, Kimmo; Nurmi, Sami; Tenkanen, Tommi
  • Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 06
  • DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2016/06/022

Testing MeV dark matter with neutrino detectors
journal, January 2008


Dark matter in the minimal inverse seesaw mechanism
journal, October 2014

  • Abada, Asmaa; Arcadi, Giorgio; Lucente, Michele
  • Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2014, Issue 10
  • DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2014/10/001

The νMSM, inflation, and dark matter
journal, August 2006


Works referencing / citing this record:

Thermalizing sterile neutrino dark matter
text, January 2017