Cosmology of "Visible" Sterile Neutrinos

Abstract

We point out that in scenarios with a low reheating temperature $T_R << 100$ MeV at the end of (the last episode of) inflation or entropy production, the abundance of sterile neutrinos becomes largely independent of their coupling to active neutrinos. Thus, cosmological bounds become less stringent than usually assumed, allowing sterile neutrinos to be ``visible'' in future experiments. For example, the sterile neutrino required by the LSND result does not have any cosmological problem within these scenarios.