English

New Constraints on "Cool" Dark Matter

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2007-05-23 v1 Astrophysics

Abstract

It has been suggested that a sterile neutrino \nu_s which mixes with standard neutrinos can form nonthermal ``cool'' Dark Matter if its mass and mixing angle fall in the ranges 0.1 keV \lsim m_s \lsim 10 keV and 10^{-10} \lsim \sin^2 \theta \lsim 10^{-4}, respectively. We point out that the required mixing makes these heavy neutrinos unstable. The dominant decay mode is into three light neutrinos, but the most stringent constraint comes from the non-observation of radiative decays into a single light neutrino and a photon. Moreover, we point out that the density of thermal relics of such \nu_{s}'s would be too high, unless the reheating temperature after inflation was below \sim 10 GeV.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0006274,
  title  = {New Constraints on "Cool" Dark Matter},
  author = {Manuel Drees and David Wright},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0006274},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

LaTeX, 6 pages, one PS figure

R2 v1 2026-07-22T13:27:37.568Z