Sterile neutrino, hidden dark matter and their cosmological signatures

Abstract

Though thermal dark matter has been the central idea behind the dark matter candidates, it is highly possible that dark matter of the universe is non-thermal in origin or it might be in thermal contact with some hidden or dark sector but not with standard model. Here we explore the cosmological bounds as well as the signatures on two types of non-thermal dark matter candidates. First we discuss a hidden dark matter with almost no interaction (or very feeble) with standard model particles so that it is not in thermal contact with visible sector but we assume it is thermalized with in a hidden sector due to some interaction. While encompassing the standard cold WIMP scenario, we do not require the freeze-out process to be non-relativistic. Rather, freeze-out may also occur when dark matter particles are semi-relativistic or relativistic. Especially we focus on the warm dark matter scenario in this set up and find the constraints on the warm dark matter mass, cross-section and hidden to visible sector temperature ratio which accounts for the observed dark-matter density, satisfies the Tremaine-Gunn bound on dark-matter phase space density and has a free-streaming length consistent with cosmological constraints on the matter power spectrum. Our method can also be applied to keV sterile neutrino dark matter which is not thermalized with standard model but is thermalized with in a dark sector. The second part of this proceeding focuses on an exotic dark matter candidate which arises from the existence of eV mass sterile neutrino through a late phase transition. Due to existence of a strong scalar force the light sterile states get trapped into stable degenerate micro nuggets. We find that its signature in matter power spectra is close to a warm dark matter candidate.