Plasma Effects Suppress Mixing-Induced Collisional Freeze-In

Abstract

Dark matter that is weakly mixed with particles in a thermal plasma can be produced through both, oscillatory and collisional freeze-in. While plasma effects have long been known to suppress the former, their role in collisional freeze-in remains less clear quantitatively, leading to conflicting results in sterile neutrino dark matter production via collisional freeze-in. Using first-principles nonequilibrium Kadanoff-Baym equations in the flavour-covariant formulation, we establish the general result that plasma effects also suppress collisional freeze-in: the vacuum mixing angle in the collision rate is replaced by its plasma-corrected counterpart. Applying this result, we conclude that sterile neutrinos cannot be dark matter in the keV-MeV mass range when produced from the Standard Model plasma.