The role of the eROSITA all-sky survey in searches for sterile neutrino dark matter

Understand

We investigate for the first time the potential of angular auto- and cross-correlation power spectra in identifying sterile neutrino dark matter in the cosmic X-ray background.

• We take as reference the performance of the soon-to-be-launched eROSITA satellite.
• The main astrophysical background sources against sterile neutrino decays are active galactic nuclei, galaxies powered by X-ray binaries, and clusters of galaxies.
• While sterile neutrino decays are always subdominant in the auto-correlation power spectra, they can be efficiently enhanced when cross-correlating with tracers of the dark matter distribution such as galaxies in the 2MASS catalogues.