Visible in the laboratory and invisible in cosmology: decaying sterile neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper investigates keV-scale sterile neutrinos produced in low reheating temperature universes, highlighting their potential detectability in upcoming experiments and their role in addressing cosmological tensions.

Contribution

It introduces the possibility of sterile neutrinos with dark decay channels being largely unconstrained by cosmology, expanding the viable parameter space for these particles.

Findings

Sterile neutrinos with dark decay are cosmologically unconstrained.

Low reheating temperatures relax constraints on sterile neutrino parameters.

Potential of sterile neutrinos to resolve the Hubble tension.

Abstract

The expansion history and thermal physical process that happened in the early Universe before big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) remains relatively unconstrained by observations. Low reheating temperature universes with normalcy temperatures of $T_\mathrm{RH}\sim 2\,\mathrm{MeV}$ remain consistent with primordial nucleosynthesis, and accommodate several new physics scenarios that would normally be constrained by high-temperature reheating models, including massive sterile neutrinos. We explore such scenarios' production of keV scale sterile neutrinos and their resulting constraints from cosmological observations. The parameter space for massive sterile neutrinos is much less constrained than in high-$T_\mathrm{RH}$ thermal histories, though several cosmological constraints remain. Such parameter space is the target of several current and upcoming laboratory experiments such as TRISTAN (KATRIN), HUNTER, MAGNETO-$\nu$, and PTOLEMY. Cosmological constraints remain stringent for stable keV-scale sterile neutrinos. However, we show that sterile neutrinos with a dark decay to radiation through a $Z^\prime$ or a new scalar are largely unconstrained by cosmology. In addition, this mechanism of sterile neutrinos with large mixing may provide a solution to the Hubble tension. We find that keV-scale sterile neutrinos are therefore one of the best probes of the untested pre-BBN era in the early Universe and could be seen in upcoming laboratory experiments.