Abstract
Long-lived sterile neutrinos can play the role of dark matter. We consider the possibility that such neutrinos form a thermal bath with a singlet scalar, while not being in thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model fields. Eventually, the neutrino dark matter undergoes freeze-out in the dark sector, which can occur in both non-relativistic and relativistic regimes. To account for the latter possibility, we use the full Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein distribution functions with effective chemical potential in the reaction rate computation. This allows us to study the freeze-out process in detail and also obtain the necessary thermalization conditions. We find that relativistic freeze-out occurs in a relatively small part of the parameter space. In contrast to the standard weakly-interacting-massive-particle (WIMP) scenario, the allowed dark matter masses extend to 104 TeV without conflicting perturbativity.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Valentina De Romeri for collaborating at the early stages of the project and providing us with figure 2. This work was supported by the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research KAKENHI Grant No. JP20K22349 and JP23H04004 (TT).
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Lebedev, O., Toma, T. Sterile neutrino dark matter: relativistic freeze-out. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 108 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2023)108
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2023)108