Sterile neutrino dark matter: A tale of weak interactions in the strong coupling epoch

TL;DR

This paper investigates how weak interactions in the early universe influence the production and properties of 7 keV sterile neutrino dark matter, with implications for small-scale structure formation.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analytical and numerical analysis of weak interaction effects on sterile neutrino production, including lepton asymmetry redistribution and neutrino opacity, across the quark-hadron transition.

Findings

Sterile neutrino phase space densities are significantly affected by weak interactions.

Transfer functions for density fluctuations show cutoffs relevant to galaxy formation.

Results are robust despite uncertainties in the quark-hadron transition.

Abstract

We perform a detailed study of the weak interactions of standard model neutrinos with the primordial plasma and their effect on the resonant production of sterile neutrino dark matter. Motivated by issues in cosmological structure formation on small scales, and reported X-ray signals that could be due to sterile neutrino decay, we consider $7$ keV-scale sterile neutrinos. Oscillation-driven production of such sterile neutrinos occurs at temperatures $T \gtrsim 100$ MeV, where we study two significant effects of weakly charged species in the primordial plasma: (1) the redistribution of an input lepton asymmetry; (2) the opacity for active neutrinos. We calculate the redistribution analytically above and below the quark-hadron transition, and match with lattice QCD calculations through the transition. We estimate opacities due to tree level processes involving leptons and quarks above the quark-hadron transition, and the most important mesons below the transition. We report final sterile neutrino dark matter phase space densities that are significantly influenced by these effects, and yet relatively robust to remaining uncertainties in the nature of the quark-hadron transition. We also provide transfer functions for cosmological density fluctuations with cutoffs at $k \simeq 10 \ h \ {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, that are relevant to galactic structure formation.