RIKEN Lunch Seminar

"Sterile neutrino dark matter produced after the QCD phase transition"

Presented by Louis Lello, University of Pittsburgh

Thursday, December 3, 2015, 12:30 pm — Building 510 Room 2-160

Sterile neutrinos are SU(2) singlets that mix with active neutrinos via a mass matrix, its diagonalization leads to mass eigenstates that couple via standard model vertices. We study the production of sterile neutrinos in the early universe from pion decays shortly after the QCD phase transition in the absence of a lepton asymmetry. We introduce the quantum kinetic equations that describe their production, freeze out and decay and discuss the various processes that lead to their production in a wide range of temperatures assessing their feasibility as dark matter candidates. We consider the production of heavy neutrinos in the mass range < 140MeV from pion decay shortly after the QCD crossover including finite temperature corrections to the pion form factors and mass. We consider the different decay channels that allow for the production of heavy neutrinos showing that their frozen distribution functions exhibit effects from "kinematic entanglement" and argue for their viability as mixed dark matter candidates. We discuss abundance, phase space density and stability constraints and argue that heavy neutrinos with lifetime >1/H0 freeze out of local thermal equilibrium.

Hosted by: Daniel Pitonyak

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