Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter as a Probe of Inflationary Reheating

Abstract

Sterile neutrinos offer a minimal and testable explanation for dark matter (DM), with their radiative decay actively searched for in X-ray observations. We show that cold sterile neutrino DM can be efficiently produced during reheating from inflaton decays with a small branching ratio, ${\rm BR}\lesssim 10^{-4}$. This production mechanism opens regions of parameter space where the active-sterile mixing is small enough to evade current X-ray constraints while reproducing the observed DM abundance. We systematically map the viable parameter space in terms of the sterile neutrino mass, mixing angle, inflaton mass, reheating temperature, and branching ratio. We further demonstrate that sterile neutrino DM can serve as a probe of inflationary reheating, with future X-ray observations capable of yielding information on the inflaton mass and the reheating-temperature ratio $m_\phi/T_{\rm rh}$. For a given inflationary model in which the inflaton mass is known, this leads to a lower bound on the reheating temperature that is several orders of magnitude stronger than the existing bound from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.