Speaker
Description
Sterile neutrinos produced through resonant or non-resonant oscillations are a well motivated dark matter candidate, but recent constraints from observations have ruled out most of the parameter space. Based on general considerations we find a thermalization mechanism which
can increase the yield after resonant and non-resonant production. At the same time, it alleviates
the growing tensions with structure formation and X-ray observations and even revives simple non-resonant production as a viable way to produce sterile neutrino dark matter. We investigate the
parameters required for the realization of the thermalization mechanism in a representative model
and find that a simple estimate based on energy- and entropy conservation describes the mechanism
well.
