Abstract
Determining the physical nature of dark matter is central to contemporary astrophysics and particle physics. The hypothetical sterile neutrinos with a mass of order keV are one of the most promising candidate particles for dark matter, which can play an important role in particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. In radiative decay, a keV sterile neutrino releases an X-ray photon that has an energy half of the neutrino’s rest mass, which facilitates its indirect detection. In 2014, using stacked XMM-Newton spectra of nearby galaxy clusters, researchers reported the detection of a weak line-like feature at 3.5 keV, which was interpreted as the decaying signal of sterile neutrino dark matter. However, follow-up studies did not reach a consensus on the reality of this signal, chiefly due to the limited quality of current X-ray data. The Einstein Probe, with its unique wide-field telescopes, has the great potential of confirming or rejecting the 3.5 keV signal from nearby massive galaxies and galaxy clusters, and will effectively conduct a highly sensitive search for dark matter over the keV energy range.
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