Sterile Neutrinos and Light Dark Matter Save Each Other

Understand

Short baseline neutrino experiments such as LSND and MiniBooNE seem to suggest the existence of light sterile neutrinos.

• Meanwhile, current cosmic microwave background (CMB) and big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) measurements place an upper bound on the effective number of light neutrinos, $N_{eff}$ and the PLANCK satellite will measure $N_{eff}$ to a much higher accuracy and further constrain the number of sterile neutrinos allowed.
• We demonstrate that if an MeV dark matter particle couples more strongly to electrons and/or photons than to neutrinos, then p-wave annihilation after neutrino decoupling can reduce the value of $N_{eff}$ inferred from BBN and PLANCK.
• This mechanism can accommodate two eV sterile neutrinos even if PLANCK observes $N_{eff}$ as low as the standard model theoretical value of 3.046, and a large neutrino asymmetry is not needed to obtain the correct primordial element abundances.