A laboratory detection of a sterile neutrino could provide the first indication of the evolution of the Universe before Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), an epoch yet untested. Such “visible” sterile neutrinos are observable in upcoming experiments such as KATRIN/TRISTAN and HUNTER in the keV mass range and PTOLEMY and others in the eV mass range. A set of standard assumptions is typically made about cosmology before the temperature of the Universe was 5 MeV. However, non-standard pre-BBN cosmologies based on alternative assumptions could arise in motivated theoretical models and are equally in agreement with all existing data. We revisit the production of sterile neutrinos of mass 0.01 eV to 1 MeV in two examples of such models: scalar-tensor and low reheating temperature pre-BBN cosmologies. In both of them, the putative 3.5 keV X-ray signal line corresponds to a sterile neutrino with a mixing large enough to be tested in upcoming laboratory experiments. Additionally, the cosmological/astrophysical upper limits on active-sterile neutrino mixings are significantly weaker than in the standard pre-BBN cosmology, which shows that these limits are not robust. For example, in the scalar-tensor case the potential signal regions implied by the LSND and MiniBooNE short-baseline as well as the DANSS and NEOS reactor experiments are entirely not bound by cosmological restrictions. Our work highlights that sterile neutrinos may constitute a sensitive probe of the pre-BBN epoch.
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