Dark Population Transfer Mechanism for Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter.

We present a mechanism for producing a cosmologically significant relic density of one or more sterile neutrinos. This scheme invokes two steps: First, a population of "heavy" sterile neutrinos is created by scattering-induced decoherence of active neutrinos. Second, this population is transferred, via sterile neutrino self-interaction-mediated scatterings and decays, to one or more lighter mass (∼10  keV to ∼1  GeV) sterile neutrinos that are far more weakly (or not at all) mixed with active species and could constitute dark matter.