MeV sterile neutrinos in low reheating temperature cosmological scenarios

It is commonly assumed that the cosmological and astrophysical bounds on the mixings of sterile with active neutrinos are much more stringent than those obtained from laboratory measurements. We point out that in scenarios with a very low reheating temperature T-RH << 100 MeV at the end of (the last episode of) inflation or entropy creation, the abundance of sterile neutrinos becomes greatly suppressed with respect to that obtained within the standard framework. Thus, in this case cosmological bounds become much less stringent than usually assumed, allowing sterile neutrinos to be 'visible' in future experiments. Here, we concentrate on massive (mostly sterile) neutrinos with masses m(s) > 1 MeV for T-RH <= ms.