1. Production of keV sterile neutrinos in supernovae: New constraints and gamma-ray observables
- Author
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Carlos Arguelles, Joachim Kopp, Vedran Brdar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Nuclear Science
- Subjects
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) ,Physics ,Sterile neutrino ,Particle physics ,Physics::Instrumentation and Detectors ,010308 nuclear & particles physics ,Astrophysics::High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena ,Solar neutrino ,High Energy Physics::Phenomenology ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Solar neutrino problem ,Computer Science::Digital Libraries ,7. Clean energy ,01 natural sciences ,Cosmic neutrino background ,High Energy Physics - Phenomenology ,High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) ,Neutrino detector ,0103 physical sciences ,Measurements of neutrino speed ,High Energy Physics::Experiment ,Neutrino astronomy ,Neutrino ,Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena ,010303 astronomy & astrophysics - Abstract
We study the production of sterile neutrinos in supernovae, focusing in particular on the keV--MeV mass range, which is the most interesting range if sterile neutrinos are to account for the dark matter in the Universe. Focusing on the simplest scenario in which sterile neutrinos mixes only with muon or tau neutrino, we argue that the production of keV--MeV sterile neutrinos can be strongly enhanced by a Mikheyev--Smirnov--Wolfenstein (MSW) resonance, so that a substantial flux is expected to emerge from a supernova, even if vacuum mixing angles between active and sterile neutrinos are tiny. Using energetics arguments, this yields limits on the sterile neutrino parameter space that reach down to mixing angles of the order of $\sin^2 2\theta \lesssim 10^{-14}$ and are up to an order of magnitude stronger than those from X-ray observations. While supernova limits suffer from larger systematic uncertainties than X-ray limits they apply also to scenarios in which sterile neutrinos are not abundantly produced in the early Universe. We also compute the flux of $\mathcal{O}(\text{MeV})$ photons expected from the decay of sterile neutrinos produced in supernovae, but find that it is beyond current observational reach even for a nearby supernova., Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures. Matches version published in PRD
- Published
- 2019
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