Related papers: Sterile neutrinos and structure formation
Sterile neutrinos offer a minimal and testable explanation for dark matter (DM), with their radiative decay actively searched for in X-ray observations. We show that cold sterile neutrino DM can be efficiently produced during reheating from…
We consider a scenario where keV sterile neutrinos constitute all of the currently inferred dark matter abundance, whose radiative decays could potentially account for the flux contributions to the X-ray background attributed to unresolved…
I point out that the sterile neutrinos suggested as candidates of "cool" Dark Matter will decay through their mixing with light neutrinos. This leads to an upper bound of about 200 keV on the mass of the sterile neutrinos, but might…
We discuss under what circumstances a signal in upcoming laboratory searches for keV-scale sterile neutrinos would be compatible with those particles being a sizable part or all of dark matter. In the parameter space that will be…
We present a detailed study of the production of dark matter in the form of a sterile neutrino via freeze-in from decays of heavy right-handed neutrinos. Our treatment accounts for thermal effects in the effective couplings, generated via…
The first stars to form in the Universe may be powered by the annihilation of weakly interacting dark matter particles. These so-called dark stars, if observed, may give us a clue about the nature of dark matter. Here we examine which…
We investigate the early Universe production of sterile neutrino Dark Matter by the decays of singlet scalars. All previous studies applied simplifying assumptions and/or studied the process only on the level of number densities, which…
We summarize the impact of sterile neutrino dark matter on core-collapse supernova explosions. We explore various oscillations between electron neutrinos or mixed $\mu-\tau$ neutrinos and right-handed sterile neutrinos that may occur within…
Sterile neutrinos may be one of the best Warm Dark Matter candidates we have today. Both lower and upper bounds on the mass of the sterile neutrino come from astronomical observations. We show that the proper inclusion of the neutrino…
Space-based instruments provide new and, in some cases, unique opportunities to search for dark matter. In particular, if dark matter comprises sterile neutrinos, the x ray detection of their decay line is the most promising strategy for…
We propose the radiative decay of sterile neutrinos which fill a fraction of the halo dark matter with a mass of 27.4 eV and lifetime of $\sim 10^{22}$ sec. as a way to explain the observed diffuse ionization in the Milky Way galaxy. Since…
A sterile neutrino with a mass around the keV scale could be an interesting candidate for warm dark matter. Although there are several scenarios and production mechanisms known in which such a particle could yield the correct abundance,…
Light sterile neutrinos with a mass of $\sim 1$ eV continue to be interesting due to multiple hints from terrestrial experiments. This simple hypothesis suffers from strong astrophysical constraints, in particular from the early universe as…
A recent study shows that gravitational scattering of dark matter, in the form of massive objects with mass $m \sim 10^3-10^4M_{\odot}$, could provide a possible solution to alleviate the small-scale structure problems of cold dark matter.…
We consider the possibility of constraining decaying dark matter by looking out through the Milky Way halo. Specifically we use Chandra blank sky observations to constrain the parameter space of sterile neutrinos. We find that a broad band…
We use the Ly-alpha forest power spectrum measured by the SDSS and high-resolution spectroscopy observations in combination with cosmic microwave background and galaxy clustering constraints to place limits on a sterile neutrino as a dark…
Dark matter (DM) decays and annihilations might heat and partially reionize the Universe at high redshift. Although this effect is not important for the cosmic reionization, the gas heating due to DM particles might affect the structure…
We describe two new generation mechanisms for Dark Matter composed of sterile neutrinos with ${\cal O}(1)$ keV mass. The model contains a light scalar field which coherently oscillates in the early Universe and modulates the Majorana mass…
We analyze a scenario in which the lightest heavy neutrino $N_1$ is a dark matter candidate and the second- heaviest neutrino $N_2$ decays producing a lepton number. If $N_1$ were in thermal equilibrium, its energy density today would be…
We present a mechanism for producing a cosmologically-significant relic density of one or more sterile neutrinos. This scheme invokes two steps: First, a population of "heavy" sterile neutrinos is created by scattering-induced decoherence…