Testing the sterile neutrino dark matter paradigm with astrophysical observations

Abstract

Sterile neutrino dark matter is expected to suppress structure formation at small astrophysical scales. The details of the suppression depend on the sterile neutrino production mechanism in the early universe. In this proceeding, we focus on the most popular cases of resonant production (via the mixing between active and sterile neutrinos) and scalar decay production (via the decay of a hypothetical scalar singlet). We first review current constraints from structure formation before discussing how the sterile neutrino dark matter hypothesis can alleviate the overabundance problem of dwarf galaxies in the local universe.