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Effective theory of light Dirac neutrino portal dark matter with observable ΔNeff

Debasish Borah1,2,*, Satyabrata Mahapatra3,†, Dibyendu Nanda4,‡, Sujit Kumar Sahoo5,§, and Narendra Sahu5,∥

  • *Contact author: dborah@iitg.ac.in
  • †Contact author: satyabrata@g.skku.edu
  • ‡Contact author: dnanda@het.phys.sci.osaka-u.ac.jp
  • §Contact author: ph21resch11008@iith.ac.in
  • ∥Contact author: nsahu@phy.iith.ac.in
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 055010 – Published 8 September, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/m7my-1cjy

Abstract

We study the possibility of light Dirac neutrino portal dark matter (DM) in an effective field theory setup. Dirac nature of light neutrino automatically includes its right chiral part νR which, in our setup, also acts like a portal between DM and the standard model (SM) particles. Considering a Dirac fermion singlet DM stabilized by an unbroken Z2 symmetry, we write down all possible dimension-6 effective operators involving DM-νR as well as νR-SM which conserve Z2, global lepton number and SM gauge symmetries. DM thermalization also ensures the thermalization of νR, leading to enhanced effective relativistic degrees of freedom Neff, within reach of future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We study the complementarity among DM and CMB related observations for different Lorentz structures of effective operators. We also propose a UV complete gauged B-L symmetric model with Dirac neutrino portal dark matter.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 055010– Published 8 September, 2025
  • Received 13 June 2025
  • Accepted 19 August 2025
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