Heavy sterile neutrinos in laboratories and cosmology

por Silvia Pascoli (IPPP Durham)

lunes 25 may. 2009 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

Sala Seminarios IFIC (Edf. Institutos de Investigación)

Sterile neutrinos constitute a minimal extension of the standard model. They do not have Standard Model interactions but mix with light neutrinos. They have interesting signatures in cosmology as they have been proposed as dark matter candidates, can affect structure formation and can modify standard big bang nucleosynthesis. In laboratory searches, no positive evidence of sterile neutrinos has been found so far, but many experimental techniques can be employed. In this talk, I will focus on sterile neutrinos in the keV-TeV range and review their role in cosmology and the experimental searches which have been performed so far, from peak searches to neutrino decays, from kinks in beta-decay to lepton number violating processes.