Juliana Stachurska Heidelberg

Sterile Neutrinos in Extra Dimensions as Warm Dark Matter Candidates(pdf)

Non-zero neutrino masses imply the existence of right-handed neutrinos, which are sterile under standard model interactions but have small mixing with active neutrinos. Sterile neutrinos with a mass of O(keV) could account for Warm Dark Matter in the universe. In a scenario with compactified large extra dimensions, sterile neutrino states can be expressed as an infinite tower of Kaluza-Klein (KK) modes with quantized masses that depend on the radius of the extra dimension. Open questions are the effects of the KK tower on the beta-spectrum in neutrino mass experiments and on the generation of the dark matter abundance.