2014/03/18 by Brian Shuve, Itay Yavin · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Anomalous magnetic dipole moment #Boson #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Coupling (piping) #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Gauge (firearms) #Gauge boson #Gauge group #Gauge theory #Muon #Neutrino #Neutrino oscillation #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Standard Model (mathematical formulation) #Sterile neutrino #Vector boson #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.89.113004
published as Phys. Rev. D 89, 113004 (2014) · 5 pages, 3 figures. v2: references added, submitted to PRL
arxiv created 2014/03/18 · openalex publication_date 2014/06/11 · arxiv updated 2014/06/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We show that the existence of new, light gauge interactions coupled to Standard Model (SM) neutrinos gives rise to an abundance of sterile neutrinos through the sterile neutrinos' mixing with the SM. Specifically, in the mass range of MeV--GeV and coupling of g^\ensuremath'\ensuremath∼10^\ensuremath-6--10^\ensuremath-3, the decay of this new vector boson in the early Universe produces a sufficient quantity of sterile neutrinos to account for the observed dark matter abundance. Interestingly, this can be achieved within a natural extension of the SM gauge group, such as a gauged L_\ensuremathμ\ensuremath-L_\ensuremathτ number, without any tree-level coupling between the new vector boson and the sterile neutrino states. Such new leptonic interactions might also be at the origin of the well-known discrepancy associated with the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon.