Search

The XENON1T collaboration recently reported the excess of events from recoil electrons, possibly giving an insight into new area beyond the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. We try to explain this excess by considering effective interactions between the sterile neutrinos and the SM particles. In this paper, we present an effective model based on one-particle-irreducible interaction vertices at low energies that are induced from the SM gauge symmetric four-fermion operators at high energies. The effective interaction strength is constrained by the SM precision measurements, astrophysical and cosmological observations. We introduce a novel effective electromagnetic interaction between sterile neutrinos and SM neutrinos, which can successfully explain the XENON1T event rate through inelastic scattering of the sterile neutrino dark matter from Xenon electrons. We find that sterile neutrinos with masses around 90 keV and specific effective coupling can fit well with the XENON1T data where the best fit points preserving DM constraints and possibly describe the anomalies in other experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of relativistic species, Neff, has been precisely calculated in the standard model, and would be measured to the percent level by CMB-S4 in future. Neutral-current non-standard interactions would affect neutrino decoupling in the early Universe, thus modifying Neff. We parameterize those operators up to dimension-7 in the effective field theory framework, and then provide a complete, generic and analytical dictionary for the collision term integrals. From precision measurements of Neff, the most stringent constraint is obtained for the dimension-6 vector-type neutrino-electron operator, whose scale is constrained to be above about 195 (331) GeV from Planck (CMB-S4). We find our results complementary to other experiments like neutrino coherent scattering, neutrino oscillation, collider, and neutrino deep inelastic scattering experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]