Dark sterile neutrinos on a linear seesaw of neutrino masses

Sterile neutrinos as source of the mass and flavor mixing of active neutrinos as well as genesis of the dark matter (DM) and matter-antimatter asymmetry have gained special interest. Here we study the case of the Standard Model (SM) extended with three right-handed (RH) neutrinos and a dark sector with two extra sterile neutrinos, odd under a discrete Z₂ symmetry. The RH neutrinos are responsible for producing the baryon asymmetry via the high-scale unflavored leptogenesis. They are superheavy and their abundance at the electroweak broken stage is vanishingly small, so that they have no impact on the phenomenology at low energies. The two dark neutrinos generate the tiny mass of two active neutrinos through a mechanism similar to the minimal linear seesaw, and saturate the relic abundance as freeze-in DM via decay of the heavy SM bosons. The absence of the dark Majorana mass terms in the dark linear seesaw is explained by invoking a hidden symmetry, the so-called presymmetry, and the DM candidate appears in the form of a quasi-Dirac neutrino. The Z₂ symmetry is broken in the dark neutrino sector, but exact in the realm of RH neutrinos. The required coupling weakness for the freeze-in DM neutrino is related to a very small breach of unitarity in the active neutrino mixing matrix. We show how phenomenological constraints on the production and decay of the DM neutrino imply an upper bound around 1 MeV for its mass and unitarity up to O (10^-7) for the mixing matrix.