Shedding New Light on Sterile Neutrinos from XENON1T Experiment

TL;DR

This paper proposes an effective interaction model for sterile neutrinos to explain the XENON1T electron recoil excess, fitting data with sterile neutrinos around 90 keV and specific couplings, consistent with other constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel effective electromagnetic interaction between sterile and SM neutrinos that can account for the XENON1T excess, integrating high-energy SM operators with low-energy phenomenology.

Findings

Sterile neutrinos around 90 keV can explain the XENON1T excess.

Effective couplings are consistent with astrophysical and cosmological constraints.

The model fits data while satisfying dark matter and other experimental bounds.

Abstract

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.