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Return of the lepton number: Sterile neutrino dark matter production and the revival of the Shi-Fuller mechanism

Cannon M. Vogel1,*, Helena García Escudero1,†, Julien Froustey2,3,‡, and Kevork N. Abazajian1,§

  • *Contact author: cvogel1@uci.edu
  • †Contact author: garciaeh@uci.edu
  • ‡Contact author: jfroustey@berkeley.edu
  • §Contact author: kevork@uci.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 123508 – Published 3 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/nys6-tkhl

Abstract

We explore resonant production of sterile neutrino dark matter via the Shi-Fuller (SF) mechanism, revisiting its cosmological viability in light of recent results demonstrating that lepton-number asymmetries Lα≳1 at temperatures T>20  MeV are consistent with big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). Using a quasiclassical Boltzmann transport calculation of the dark matter production, we compute the nonthermal phase space distributions of sterile neutrinos across a broad range of particle mass ms and mixing angle sin2(2θ) parameter space. We then evolve the resulting distributions through linear structure formation using CLASS and fit the resulting matter power spectra to thermal warm dark matter (WDM) transfer functions, enabling a direct mapping between SF models and equivalent thermal WDM particle masses mth. This allows us to reinterpret existing structure formation limits and Lyman-α forest preferences in the context of SF production. We find that lepton asymmetries L≳0.5 at high temperatures open significant viable parameter space in the ms≳10  keV and sin2(2θ)≲10−14 regime, compatible with both x-ray constraints from NuSTAR and INTEGRAL/SPI and recent Lyman-α inferences of mth≈4.1  keV. Following lepton number evolution below 20 MeV, we also specifically show that this lepton asymmetry parameter space is compatible with BBN and cosmic microwave background constraints. We present updated constraints, a refined mth fitting function, and power-law approximations for L across the parameter space. Our results motivate future x-ray observations targeting the ∼20  keV photon regime and testing of the mth≳10  keV WDM region.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 123508– Published 3 December, 2025
  • Received 13 August 2025
  • Accepted 31 October 2025
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