Abstract: We present a comprehensive review of keV-scale sterile neutrino Dark Matter, collecting views and insights from all disciplines involved – cosmology, astrophysics, nuclear, and particle physics – in each case viewed from both theoretical and experimental/observational perspectives. After reviewing the role of active neutrinos in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, we focus on sterile neutrinos in the context of the Dark Matter puzzle. Here, we first review the physics motivation for sterile neutrino Dark Matter, based on challenges and tensions in purely cold Dark Matter scenarios. We then round out the discussion by critically summarizing all known constraints on sterile neutrino Dark Matter arising from astrophysical observations, laboratory experiments, and theoretical considerations. In this context, we provide a balanced discourse on the possibly positive signal from X-ray observations. Another focus of the paper concerns the construction of particle physics models, aiming to explain how sterile neutrinos of keV-scale masses could arise in concrete settings beyond the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The paper ends with an extensive review of current and future astrophysical and laboratory searches, highlighting new ideas and their experimental challenges, as well as future perspectives for the discovery of sterile neutrinos.

Abstract: Nonzero neutrino masses are required by the existence of flavour oscillations, with values of the order of at least 50 meV. We consider the gravitational clustering of relic neutrinos within the Milky Way, and used the N – one-body simulation technique to compute their density enhancement factor in the neighbourhood of the Earth with respect to the average cosmic density. Compared to previous similar studies, we pushed the simulation down to smaller neutrino masses, and included an improved treatment of the baryonic and dark matter distributions in the Milky Way. Our results are important for future experiments aiming at detecting the cosmic neutrino background, such as the Princeton Tritium Observatory for Light, Early-universe, Massive-neutrino Yield (PTOLEMY) proposal. We calculate the impact of neutrino clustering in the Milky Way on the expected event rate for a PTOLEMY-like experiment. We find that the effect of clustering remains negligible for the minimal normal hierarchy scenario, while it enhances the event rate by 10 to 20% (resp. a factor 1.7 to 2.5) for the minimal inverted hierarchy scenario (resp. a degenerate scenario with 150 meV masses). Finally we compute the impact on the event rate of a possible fourth sterile neutrino with a mass of 1.3 eV.

Abstract: We consider the phenomenological implications of the violation of the Pauli exclusion principle for neutrinos, focusing on cosmological observables such as the spectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and the primordial abundances of light elements. Neutrinos that behave (at least partly) as bosonic particles have a modified equilibrium distribution function that implies a different influence on the evolution of the Universe that, in the case of massive neutrinos, can not be simply parametrized by a change in the effective number of neutrinos. Our results show that, despite the precision of the available cosmological data, only very weak bounds can be obtained on neutrino statistics, disfavouring a more bosonic behaviour at less than 2 sigma.

Abstract: We study the impact of non-standard momentum distributions of cosmic neutrinos on the anisotropy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and the matter power spectrum of the large scale structure. We show that the neutrino distribution has almost no unique observable imprint, as it is almost entirely degenerate with the effective number of neutrino flavours, N-eff, and the neutrino mass, m(nu). Performing a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis with current cosmological data, we demonstrate that the neutrino mass bound heavily depends on the assumed momentum distribution of relic neutrinos. The message of this work is simple and has to our knowledge not been pointed out clearly before: cosmology allows that neutrinos have larger masses if their average momentum is larger than that of a perfectly thermal distribution. Here we provide an example in which the mass limits are relaxed by a factor of two.

Abstract: The PTOLEMY project aims to develop a scalable design for a Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) detector, the first of its kind and the only one conceived that can look directly at the image of the Universe encoded in neutrino background produced in the first second after the Big Bang. The scope of the work for the next three years is to complete the conceptual design of this detector and to validate with direct measurements that the non-neutrino backgrounds are below the expected cosmological signal. In this paper we discuss in details the theoretical aspects of the experiment and its physics goals. In particular, we mainly address three issues. First we discuss the sensitivity of PTOLEMY to the standard neutrino mass scale. We then study the perspectives of the experiment to detect the CNB via neutrino capture on tritium as a function of the neutrino mass scale and the energy resolution of the apparatus. Finally, we consider an extra sterile neutrino with mass in the eV range, coupled to the active states via oscillations, which has been advocated in view of neutrino oscillation anomalies. This extra state would contribute to the tritium decay spectrum, and its properties, mass and mixing angle, could be studied by analyzing the features in the beta decay electron spectrum.