More Like this

1. Sterile Neutrino/Dark Fermion Dark Matter: Searches in the X-Ray Sky, the Nuclear Physics Laboratory and in Galaxy Formation

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31593-1_1  

   Kevork N. Abazajian (November 2019, Astrophysics and space science proceedings)

   The possibility of dark matter being a particle involved in the generation of neutrino mass has been of interest for over 25 years. Sterile neutrinos—or in the contemporary parlance—dark fermions, are among the simplest and most cited particles which can provide a mechanism for neutrino mass. If one particle of this class has a small mixing, it can be quasi-thermally or nonthermally produced in the early Universe, affect cosmological structure formation, and be detected by X-ray telescopes or laboratory nuclear experiments. A candidate line was detected in 2014, and I review the status of the line and its implications for galaxy formation, proposals for future observations, and laboratory detection. 

   more » « less
2. Scintillating Bubble Chambers for Rare Event Searches

   https://doi.org/10.3390/universe9080346  

   Ernesto Alfonso-Pita, Edward Behnke (August 2023, Universe)

   Baracchini, Elisabetta (Ed.)

   The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is developing liquid-noble bubble chambers for the detection of sub-keV nuclear recoils. These detectors benefit from the electron recoil rejection inherent in moderately-superheated bubble chambers with the addition of energy reconstruction provided from the scintillation signal. The ability to measure low-energy nuclear recoils allows the search for GeV-scale dark matter and the measurement of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering on argon from MeV-scale reactor antineutrinos. The first physics-scale detector, SBC-LAr10, is in the commissioning phase at Fermilab, where extensive engineering and calibration studies will be performed. In parallel, a functionally identical low-background version, SBC-SNOLAB, is being built for a dark matter search underground at SNOLAB. SBC-SNOLAB, with a 10 kg-yr exposure, will have sensitivity to a dark matter–nucleon cross section of 2×10−42 cm2 at 1 GeV/c2 dark matter mass, and future detectors could reach the boundary of the argon neutrino fog with a tonne-yr exposure. In addition, the deployment of an SBC detector at a nuclear reactor could enable neutrino physics investigations including measurements of the weak mixing angle and searches for sterile neutrinos, the neutrino magnetic moment, and the light Z’ gauge boson. 

   more » « less
3. Probing self-interacting sterile neutrino dark matter with the diffuse supernova neutrino background

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.108.123011  

   Balantekin, A. Baha; Fuller, George M.; Ray, Anupam; Suliga, Anna M. (December 2023, Physical Review D)

   The neutrinos in the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB) travel over cosmological distances and this provides them with an excellent opportunity to interact with dark relics. We show that a cosmologically significant relic population of keV-mass sterile neutrinos with strong self-interactions could imprint their presence in the DSNB. The signatures of the self-interactions would be “dips” in the otherwise smooth DSNB spectrum. Upcoming large-scale neutrino detectors, for example Hyper-Kamiokande, have a good chance of detecting the DSNB and these dips. If no dips are detected, this method serves as an independent constraint on the sterile neutrino self-interaction strength and mixing with active neutrinos. We show that relic sterile neutrino parameters that evade x-ray and structure bounds may nevertheless be testable by future detectors like TRISTAN, but may also produce dips in the DSNB which could be detectable. Such a detection would suggest the existence of a cosmologically significant, strongly self-interacting sterile neutrino background, likely embedded in a richer dark sector. 

   more » « less
4. Review of particle physics

   Particle-data, group (October 2018, Physical Review)

   The Review summarizes much of particle physics and cosmology. Using data from previous editions, plus 2,873 new measurements from 758 papers, we list, evaluate, and average measured properties of gauge bosons and the recently discovered Higgs boson, leptons, quarks, mesons, and baryons. We summarize searches for hypothetical particles such as supersymmetric particles, heavy bosons, axions, dark photons, etc. Particle properties and search limits are listed in Summary Tables. We give numerous tables, figures, formulae, and reviews of topics such as Higgs Boson Physics, Supersymmetry, Grand Unified Theories, Neutrino Mixing, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Cosmology, Particle Detectors, Colliders, Probability and Statistics. Among the 118 reviews are many that are new or heavily revised, including a new review on Neutrinos in Cosmology. 

   more » « less
5. Dark Population Transfer Mechanism for Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter

   https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.181002  

   Fuller, George M; Gráf, Lukáš; Patwardhan, Amol V; Spisak, Jacob (October 2024, Physical Review Letters)

   We present a mechanism for producing a cosmologically significant relic density of one or more sterile neutrinos. This scheme invokes two steps: First, a population of “heavy” sterile neutrinos is created by scattering-induced decoherence of active neutrinos. Second, this population is transferred, via sterile neutrino self-interaction-mediated scatterings and decays, to one or more lighter mass ( $\sim 10\mathrm{keV}$to $\sim 1\mathrm{GeV}$) sterile neutrinos that are far more weakly (or not at all) mixed with active species and could constitute dark matter. Dark matter produced this way can evade current electromagnetic and structure-based bounds, but may nevertheless be probed by future observations. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

   more » « less