A m\'enage \`a trois of eV-scale sterile neutrinos, cosmology, and structure formation

We show that sterile neutrinos with masses ~1 eV or larger, as motivated by several short-baseline oscillation anomalies, can be consistent with cosmological constraints if they are charged under a hidden sector force mediated by a light boson. In this case, sterile neutrinos experience a large thermal potential that suppresses mixing between active and sterile neutrinos in the early Universe, even if vacuum mixing angles are large. Thus, the abundance of sterile neutrinos in the Universe remains very small, and their impact on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, Cosmic Microwave Background, and large-scale structure formation is negligible. It is conceivable that the new gauge force also couples to dark matter, possibly ameliorating some of the small-scale structure problems associated with cold dark matter.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. v3: minor corrections in the discussion of small scale structure led to the realization that all 3 problems can be solved simultaneously. Matches PRL version titled "Cosmologically Safe eV-Scale Sterile Neutrinos and Improved Dark Matter Structure". v4: references added, calculations in appendix A rewritten in Feynman gauge. ArXiv version includes 2 additional figure

Temporal Instability Enables Neutrino Flavor Conversions Deep Inside Supernovae

We show that a self-interacting neutrino gas can spontaneously acquire a non-stationary pulsating component in its flavor content, with a frequency that can exactly cancel the "multi-angle" refractive effects of dense matter. This can then enable homogeneous and inhomogeneous flavor conversion instabilities to exist even at large neutrino and matter densities, where the system would have been stable if the evolution were strictly stationary. Large flavor conversions, especially close to a supernova core, are possible via this novel mechanism. This may have important consequences for the explosion dynamics, nucleosynthesis, as well as for neutrino observations of supernovae.Comment: v3: Improved Fig.1 and fixed typos. Matches version published in PR

Leptonic CP Violation Phases, Quark-Lepton Similarity and Seesaw Mechanism

We explore generic features of the leptonic CP violation in the framework of the seesaw type I mechanism with similarity of the Dirac lepton and quarks mass matrices $m_D$. For this, we elaborate on the standard parametrization conditions which allow to simultaneously obtain the Dirac and Majorana phases. If the only origin of CP violation is the left-handed (LH) transformation which diagonalizes $m_D$ (similar to quarks), the leptonic CP violation is suppressed and the Dirac phase is close to $\pi$ or to $0$ with $\sin \delta_{CP} \approx (\sin \theta_{13}^q /\sin \theta_{13}) \cos \theta_{23} \sin \delta_q \sim \lambda^2 \sin \delta_q$. Here $\lambda \sim \theta_C$, is the Cabibbo mixing angle, and $\theta_{13}^q$ and $\theta_{13}$ are the 1-3 mixing angles of quarks and leptons respectively. The Majorana phases $\beta_1$ and $\beta_2$ are suppressed as $\lambda^3\sin\delta_q$. For Majorana neutrinos implied by seesaw, the right-handed (RH) transformations are important. We explore the simplest extension inspired by Left-Right (L-R) symmetry with small CKM-type CP violation. In this case, seesaw enhancement of the CP violation occurs due to strong hierarchy of the eigenvalues of $m_D$ leading to $\delta_{CP} \sim 1$. The enhancement is absent under the phase factorization conditions which require certain relations between parameters of the Majorana mass matrix of RH neutrinos.Comment: 30 pages. v3(typos fixed, matches version published in Nucl. Phys. B

Sterile Neutrinos with Secret Interactions - Lasting Friendship with Cosmology

Sterile neutrinos with mass ~1 eV and order 10% mixing with active neutrinos have been proposed as a solution to anomalies in neutrino oscillation data, but are tightly constrained by cosmological limits. It was recently shown that these constraints are avoided if sterile neutrinos couple to a new MeV-scale gauge boson A'. However, even this scenario is restricted by structure formation constraints when A'-mediated collisional processes lead to efficient active-to-sterile neutrino conversion after neutrinos have decoupled. In view of this, we reevaluate in this paper the viability of sterile neutrinos with such "secret" interactions. We carefully dissect their evolution in the early Universe, including the various production channels and the expected modifications to large scale structure formation. We argue that there are two regions in parameter space - one at very small A' coupling, one at relatively large A' coupling - where all constraints from big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), cosmic microwave background (CMB), and large scale structure (LSS) data are satisfied. Interestingly, the large A' coupling region is precisely the region that was previously shown to have potentially important consequences for the small scale structure of dark matter halos if the A' boson couples also to the dark matter in the Universe.Comment: 12 page

Fast neutrino flavor conversions near the supernova core with realistic flavor-dependent angular distributions

It has been recently pointed out that neutrino fluxes from a supernova can show substantial flavor conversions almost immediately above the core. Using linear stability analyses and numerical solutions of the fully nonlinear equations of motion, we perform a detailed study of these fast conversions, focussing on the region just above the supernova core. We carefully specify the instabilities for evolution in space or time, andfind that neutrinos travelling towards the core make fast conversions more generic, i.e., possible for a wider range of flux ratios and angular asymmetries that produce a crossing between the zenith-angle spectra of $\nu_e$ and ${\bar\nu_e}$. Using fluxes and angular distributions predicted by supernova simulations, we find that fast conversions can occur within tens of nanoseconds, only a few meters away from the putative neutrinospheres. If these fast flavor conversions indeed take place, they would have important implications for the supernova explosion mechanism and nucleosynthesis.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures (Improved presentation and new panel in Fig.6