Cosmological Invisible Decay of Light Sterile Neutrinos

Abstract: We introduce a cosmological invisible decay of the sterile neutrino with the eV-scale mass indicated by short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments in order to allow its full thermalization in the early Universe. We show that the fit of the cosmological data is practically as good as the fit obtained with a stable sterile neutrino without mass constraints, which has been recently considered by several authors for the explanation of the observed suppression of small-scale matter density fluctuations and for a solution of the tension between the Planck and BICEP2 measurements of the tensor to scalar ratio of large-scale fluctuations. Moreover, the extra relativistic degree of freedom corresponding to a fully thermalized sterile neutrino is correlated with a larger value of the Hubble constant, which is in agreement with local measurements.