Dark Matter Progenitor: Light Vector Boson Decay into Sterile Neutrinos
and Itay Yavin
Dark Matter Progenitor: Light Vector Boson Decay into Sterile Neutrinos (PDF)
Physical Review D 89 (2014) 113004
Abstract
We show that the existence of new, light gauge interactions coupled to Standard Model (SM) neutrinos gives rise to an abundance of sterile neutrinos through the sterile neutrinos鈥� mixing with the SM. Specifically, in the mass range of MeV鈥揋eV and coupling of ( g’ sim 10^{-6} )鈥�( 10^{-3} ), the decay of this new vector boson in the early Universe produces a sufficient quantity of sterile neutrinos to account for the observed dark matter abundance. Interestingly, this can be achieved within a natural extension of the SM gauge group, such as a gauged ( L_{mu} ) 鈭� ( L_{tau} ) number, without any tree-level coupling between the new vector boson and the sterile neutrino states. Such new leptonic interactions might also be at the origin of the well-known discrepancy associated with the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon.