Warm dark matter sterile neutrinos in electron capture and beta decay spectra

TL;DR

This paper reviews the potential to detect keV-scale sterile neutrinos, as dark matter candidates, through their effects on electron capture and beta decay spectra, providing theoretical insights and analysis for future experiments.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of sterile neutrino detection via nuclear decay spectra and introduces new ratio-based methods to analyze potential experimental signals.

Findings

Heavy neutrino emission affects electron capture spectra in Holmium 163 and Lead isotopes.

Ratios of integrated transition rates can help identify sterile neutrino signatures.

Analysis of Tritium beta decay spectra provides additional detection strategies.

Abstract

We briefly review the motivation to search for sterile neutrinos in the keV mass scale, as dark matter candidates, and the prospects to find them in beta decay or electron capture spectra, with a global perspective. We describe the fundamentals of the neutrino flavor-mass eigenstate mismatch that opens the possibility of detecting sterile neutrinos in such ordinary nuclear processes. Results are shown and discussed for the effect of heavy neutrino emission in electron capture in Holmium 163 and in two isotopes of Lead, 202 and 205, as well as in the beta decay of Tritium. We study the de-excitation spectrum in the considered cases of electron capture and the charged lepton spectrum in the case of Tritium beta decay. For each of these cases, we define ratios of integrated transition rates over different regions of the spectrum under study, and give new results that may guide and facilitate the analysis of possible future measurements, paying particular attention to forbidden transitions in Lead isotopes.