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Origin Of Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter Via Secret Neutrino Interactions With Vector Bosons, Kevin J. Kelly, Manibrata Sen, Walter Tangarife, Yue Zhang

Physics: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Secret neutrino interactions can play an essential role in the origin of dark matter. We present an anatomy of production mechanisms for sterile neutrino dark matter, a keV-scale gauge-singlet fermion that mixes with active neutrinos, in the presence of a new vector boson mediating secret interactions among active neutrinos. We identify three regimes of the vector boson’s mass and coupling where it makes a distinct impact on dark matter production through the dispersion relations and/or scattering rates. We also analyze models with gauged Lμ−Lτ and B−L numbers which have a similar dark matter cosmology but different vector boson phenomenology. We …