Trobada: Production of keV Sterile Neutrinos in Supernovae: New Constraints and Gamma Ray Observables

por Carlos Arguelles (MIT)

viernes 1 jul. 2016 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

Seminar Room, 1.1.1 (IFIC)

In this talk I will discuss production of sterile neutrinos in supernovae, focusing in particular on the keV--MeV mass range, which is the most interesting range if sterile neutrinos are to account for the dark matter in the Universe. In this mass range, the production of sterile neutrinos can be strongly enhanced by a Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) resonance, so that a substantial flux is expected to emerge from a supernova, even if vacuum mixing angles between active and sterile neutrinos are tiny. Using energetics arguments, this yields limits on the sterile neutrino parameter space that reach down to mixing angles on the order of sin^2(2?)?10^{?14} and are up to several orders of magnitude stronger than those from X-ray observations. Finally, I will show the expected flux of (MeV) photons from the decay of sterile neutrinos produced in supernovae.