Towards testing sterile neutrino dark matter with the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma mission

Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology. 2021. Vol. 103. No. 6. Article 063512.

Barinov V. V., Burenin R.A., Gorbunov D. S., Krivonos R. A.

We investigate the prospects of the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission in search for the keV-scale mass sterile neutrino dark matter radiatively decaying into active neutrinos and photons. The ongoing all-sky x-ray survey of the SRG space observatory with data acquired by the ART-XC and eROSITA telescopes can provide a possibility to fully explore the resonant production mechanism of the dark matter sterile neutrino, which exploits the lepton asymmetry in the primordial plasma consistent with cosmological limits from the big bang nucleosynthesis. In particular, it is shown that at the end of the four year all-sky survey, the sensitivity of the eROSITA telescope near the 3.5 keV line signal reported earlier can be comparable to that of the XMM-Newton with all collected data, which will allow one to carry out another independent study of the possible sterile neutrino decay signal in this area. In the energy range below ≈2.4 keV , the expected constraints on the model parameters can be significantly stronger than those obtained with the XMM-Newton. From the ART-XC data, in the energy range approximately from 5 to 20 keV, it can be possible to get more stringent constraints than those obtained with NuSTAR so far. We conclude that the SRG mission has a very high potential in testing the sterile neutrino dark matter hypothesis.

 

Keywords: astrophysics, high energy physics, Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies, High Energy Physics - Phenomenology