Restrictions on the lifetime of sterile neutrinos from primordial nucleosynthesis

We analyze the influence of sterile neutrinos with the masses in the MeV range on the primordial abundances of Helium-4 and Deuterium. We solve explicitly the Boltzmann equations for all particle species, taking into account neutrino flavour oscillations and demonstrate that the abundances are sensitive mostly to the sterile neutrino lifetime and only weakly to the way the active-sterile mixing is distributed between flavours. The decay of these particles also perturbs the spectra of (decoupled) neutrinos and heats photons, changing the ratio of neutrino to photon energy density, that can be interpreted as extra neutrino species at the recombination epoch. We derive upper bounds on the lifetime of sterile neutrinos based on both astrophysical and cosmological measurements of Helium-4 and Deuterium. We also demonstrate that the recent results of Izotov & Thuan [1], who find 2σ higher than predicted by the standard primordial nucleosynthesis value of Helium-4 abundance, are consistent with the presence in the plasma of sterile neutrinos with the lifetime 0.01–2 seconds.