Return of the Lepton Number: Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter Production and the Revival of the Shi-Fuller Mechanism
Return of the Lepton Number: Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter Production and the Revival of the Shi-Fuller Mechanism
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Abstract
We explore resonant production of sterile neutrino dark matter via the Shi-Fuller (SF) mechanism, revisiting its cosmological viability in light of recent results demonstrating that lepton-number asymmetries
at temperatures
are consistent with big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). Using a quasiclassical Boltzmann transport calculation of the dark matter production, we compute the nonthermal phase space distributions of sterile neutrinos across a broad range of particle mass
and mixing angle
parameter space. We then evolve the resulting distributions through linear structure formation using CLASS and fit the resulting matter power spectra to thermal warm dark matter (WDM) transfer functions, enabling a direct mapping between SF models and equivalent thermal WDM particle masses
. This allows us to reinterpret existing structure formation limits and Lyman-
forest preferences in the context of SF production. We find that lepton asymmetries
at high temperatures open significant viable parameter space in the
and
regime, compatible with both x-ray constraints from NuSTAR and INTEGRAL/SPI and recent Lyman-
inferences of
. Following lepton number evolution below 20 MeV, we also specifically show that this lepton asymmetry parameter space is compatible with BBN and cosmic microwave background constraints. We present updated constraints, a refined
fitting function, and power-law approximations for
across the parameter space. Our results motivate future x-ray observations targeting the
photon regime and testing of the
WDM region.
