Cosmic Structure Strikes Back: The Elimination of Vector-Mediated Nonstandard Interaction Models as a Mechanism for Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter Production
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| Formato: | Preprint |
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2025
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| author | Vogel, Cannon M. Escudero, Helena García Abazajian, Kevork N. |
| author_facet | Vogel, Cannon M. Escudero, Helena García Abazajian, Kevork N. |
| contents | We revisit sterile-neutrino production enabled by nonstandard interactions (NSI) among active neutrinos mediated by new bosons. We focus on vector mediators, including neutrinophilic, gauged $L_μ\!-\!L_τ$, and $B\!-\!L$ realizations that modify in-medium dispersion and scattering, thereby altering the active-sterile conversion history. Building on a novel production framework with NSI thermal potentials and collision integrals, we compute nonthermal phase-space distributions across sterile neutrino mixing and NSI parameters and map each point to an equivalent thermal warm dark matter particle mass $m_\mathrm{th}$ via linear-theory transfer function fitting with cosmological structure-formation Boltzmann solver. This enables a direct reinterpretation of state-of-the-art structure-formation limits from Milky Way satellites, strong lensing, and the Lyman-$α$ forest. These limits, in conjunction with X-ray decay searches, as well as results from a wide variety of particle physics experiments allow for a more complete examination of these models. We find that these vector-mediated models are ruled out when the full combination of current constraints, listed above, are taken into account. NSI scalar-mediated models and models with low-reheating temperatures remain viable. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_05631 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Cosmic Structure Strikes Back: The Elimination of Vector-Mediated Nonstandard Interaction Models as a Mechanism for Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter Production Vogel, Cannon M. Escudero, Helena García Abazajian, Kevork N. High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics We revisit sterile-neutrino production enabled by nonstandard interactions (NSI) among active neutrinos mediated by new bosons. We focus on vector mediators, including neutrinophilic, gauged $L_μ\!-\!L_τ$, and $B\!-\!L$ realizations that modify in-medium dispersion and scattering, thereby altering the active-sterile conversion history. Building on a novel production framework with NSI thermal potentials and collision integrals, we compute nonthermal phase-space distributions across sterile neutrino mixing and NSI parameters and map each point to an equivalent thermal warm dark matter particle mass $m_\mathrm{th}$ via linear-theory transfer function fitting with cosmological structure-formation Boltzmann solver. This enables a direct reinterpretation of state-of-the-art structure-formation limits from Milky Way satellites, strong lensing, and the Lyman-$α$ forest. These limits, in conjunction with X-ray decay searches, as well as results from a wide variety of particle physics experiments allow for a more complete examination of these models. We find that these vector-mediated models are ruled out when the full combination of current constraints, listed above, are taken into account. NSI scalar-mediated models and models with low-reheating temperatures remain viable. |
| title | Cosmic Structure Strikes Back: The Elimination of Vector-Mediated Nonstandard Interaction Models as a Mechanism for Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter Production |
| topic | High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05631 |