Cold dark matter from heavy right-handed neutrino mixing

Description/Abstract

We show that, within the see-saw mechanism, an almost decoupled RH neutrino species N_DM with mass M_DM \gtrsim 100 GeV can play the role of Dark Matter (DM). The N_DM's can be produced from non-adiabatic conversions of thermalized (source) RH neutrinos with mass M_S lower than M_DM. This is possible if a non-renormalizable operator is added to the minimal type I see-saw lagrangian. The observed DM abundance can be reproduced for M_DM \delta^{1/4} \sim 10^-13 \Lambda_eff \xi, where \Lambda_eff is a very high energy new physics scale, \delta \equiv (M_DM-M_S)/M_DM and \xi \lesssim 1 is a parameter determined by the RH neutrino couplings.