2011/05/31 by Alexander Merle, Viviana Niro · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Arbitrariness #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Mechanism (biology) #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutrino oscillation #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Philosophy #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scale (ratio) #Sterile neutrino #Theoretical physics #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2011/07/023
published as JCAP07(2011)023 · 37 pages, 3 figures; comment on astrophysical constraints and new section 4.9 on proton decay added, plus some minor changes; matches published version in JCAP
openalex publication_date 2011/07/14 · arxiv created 2011/07/27 · arxiv updated 2015/03/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Sterile neutrinos with a mass around the keV scale are an attractive particle physics candidate for Warm Dark Matter. Although many frameworks have been presented in which these neutrinos can fulfill all phenomenological constraints, there are hardly any models known that can explain such a peculiar mass pattern, one sterile neutrino at the keV scale and the other two considerably heavier, while at the same time being compatible with low-energy neutrino data. In this paper, we present models based on the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism, which can give such an explanation. We explain how to assign Froggatt-Nielsen charges in a successful way, and we give a detailed discussion of all conditions to be fulfilled. It turns out that the typical arbitrariness of the charge assignments is greatly reduced when trying to carefully account for all constraints. We furthermore present analytical calculations of a few simplified models, while quasi-perfect models are found numerically.