2006/12/08 by Alexey Boyarsky, J. W. den Herder, Jan Willem den Herder +3 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Superconducting and THz Device Technology #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.astropartphys.2007.06.003
published as Astropart.Phys.28:303-311,2007 · 9pp, revtex 4
arxiv created 2006/12/08 · openalex publication_date 2007/06/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Sterile neutrinos with the mass in the keV range are interesting warm dark matter (WDM) candidates. The restrictions on their parameters (mass and mixing angle) obtained by current X-ray missions (XMM-Newton or Chandra) can only be improved by less than an order of magnitude in the near future. Therefore the new strategy of search is needed. We compare the sensitivities of existing and planned X-ray missions for the detection of WDM particles with the mass ~1-20 keV. We show that existing technology allows an improvement in sensitivity by a factor of 100. Namely, two different designs can achieve such an improvement: [A] a spectrometer with the high spectral resolving power of 0.1%, wide (steradian) field of view, with small effective area of about cm2 (which can be achieved without focusing optics) or [B] the same type of spectrometer with a smaller (degree) field of view but with a much larger effective area of 103 cm2 (achieved with the help of focusing optics). To illustrate the use of the "type A" design we present the bounds on parameters of the sterile neutrino obtained from analysis of the data taken by an X-ray microcalorimeter. In spite of the very short exposure time (100 sec) the derived bound is comparable to the one found from long XMM-Newton observation.