Abstract
Sterile neutrinos with masses at the keV scale and mixing to the active neutrinos offer an elegant explanation of the observed dark matter (DM) density. However, the very same mixing inevitably leads to radiative photon emission and the non-observation of such peaked X-ray lines rules out this minimal sterile neutrino DM hypothesis. We show that in the context of the Standard Model effective field theory with sterile neutrinos (νSMEFT), higher dimensional operators can produce sterile neutrino DM in a broad range of parameter space. In particular, νSMEFT interactions can open the large mixing parameter space due to their destructive interference, through operator mixing or matching, in the X-ray emission. We also find that, even in the zero mixing limit, the DM density can always be explained by νSMEFT operators. The testability of the studied νSMEFT operators in searches for electric dipole moments, neutrinoless double beta decay, and pion decay measurements is discussed.
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Acknowledgments
We thank G. Fuller, L. Johns and J. López-Pavón for useful discussions and/or clarifications. This work was supported by the US Department of Energy Office and by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program of Los Alamos National Laboratory under project numbers 20230047DR, 20230408ER, 20220706PRD1. Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by Triad National Security, LLC, for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy (Contract No. 89233218CNA000001). The authors gratefully acknowledge the computer resources at Artemisa and the technical support provided by the Instituto de Fisica Corpuscular, IFIC (CSIC-UV). Artemisa is co-funded by the European Union through the 2014-2020 ERDF Operative Programme of Comunitat Valenciana, project IDIFEDER/2018/048.
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Fuyuto, K., Kumar, J., Mereghetti, E. et al. Sterile neutrino dark matter within the νSMEFT. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 42 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2024)042
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2024)042