Roles of sterile neutrinos in particle physics and cosmology

Abstract

The impacts of the light sterile neutrino hypothesis in particle physics and cosmology are reviewed. The observed short baseline neutrino anomalies challenging the standard explanation of neutrino oscillations within the framework of three active neutrinos are addressed. It is shown that they can be interpreted as the experimental hints pointing towards the existence of sterile neutrino at the eV scale. While the electron neutrino appearance and disappearance data are in favor of such a sterile neutrino, the muon disappearance data disfavor it, which gives rise to a strong appearance–disappearance tension. After a brief review on the cosmological effects of light sterile neutrinos, proposed signatures of light sterile neutrinos in the existing cosmological data are discussed. The keV-scale sterile neutrinos as possible dark matter candidates are also discussed by reviewing different mechanisms of how they can be produced in the early Universe and how their properties can be constrained by several cosmological observations. We give an overview of the possibility that keV-scale sterile neutrino can be a good DM candidate and play a key role in achieving low-scale leptogenesis simultaneously by introducing a model where an extra light sterile neutrino is added on top of type I seesaw model.