Nonthermal Production and Detectability of Superheavy Sterile Neutrinos

Details Nonthermal Production and Detectability of Superheavy Sterile Neutrinos Nonthermal Production and Detectability of Superheavy Sterile Neutrinos

Oct 1999

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999aps..tsf.g4502t&link_type=abstract

American Physical Society, Joint Fall Meetings of the Texas Section of the APS, AAPT, and Zone 13 of the SPS October 28-30, 1999

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Chung, Kolb, and Riotto have proposed nonthermal mechanisms for the production of superheavy dark matter, consisting of particles with masses which may range up to the GUT scale. Shi and Fuller, on the other hand, have proposed much lighter sterile neutrinos as a dark matter candidate, produced through MSW conversion of active neutrinos. Recently we proposed a different nonthermal mechanism for the production of superheavy sterile right-handed neutrinos. Such neutrinos are predicted by an SO(10) grand-unified theory, and they lead, through the seesaw mechanism, to masses for ordinary left-handed neutrinos which are consistent with atmospheric and solar neutrino observations. The mechanism discussed here involves the continuous formation of an SO(10) GUT Higgs condensate in the very early universe, with no phase transition. (This behavior of near the Big Bang singularity is analogous to the behavior of an ordinary superfluid near a vortex singularity.) Right-handed neutrinos acquire their mass from a Yukawa coupling to the Higgs field H. During an ``inflationary" period, in which the scale factor R(t) grows exponentially with the proper time t, is very small. During this same period, therefore, right-handed neutrinos have very small masses, and can be easily produced by quantum fluctuations. At a later stage, however, when the condensate is fully formed, these particles are superheavy, with masses near the GUT scale. They can then play the role of cold dark matter in subsequent structure formation. We will discuss the potential for detecting such superheavy sterile neutrinos in terrestrial experiments. For example, they should have a second-order coupling to the X bosons responsible for proton decay.

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