Sterile neutrinos as subdominant warm dark matter

Abstract

In light of recent findings which seem to disfavor a scenario with (warm) dark matter entirely constituted of sterile neutrinos produced via the Dodelson-Widrow (DW) mechanism, we investigate the constraints attainable for this mechanism by relaxing the usual hypothesis that the relic neutrino abundance must necessarily account for all of the dark matter. We first study how to reinterpret the limits attainable from X-ray non-detection and Lyman-alpha forest measurements in the case that sterile neutrinos constitute only a fraction fs of the total amount of dark matter. Then, assuming that sterile neutrinos are generated in the early universe solely through the DW mechanism, we show how the X-ray and Lyman-alpha results jointly constrain the mass-mixing parameters governing their production. Furthermore, we show how the same data allow us to set a robust upper limit fs < 0.7 at the 2 sigma level, rejecting the case of dominant dark matter (fs = 1) at the ~ 3 sigma level.