Can Sterile Neutrinos Be Ruled Out as Warm Dark Matter Candidates?

We present constraints on the mass of warm dark matter (WDM) particles from a combined analysis of the matter power spectrum inferred from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Lyman-$\alpha$ flux power spectrum at $2.2<z<4.2$, cosmic microwave background data, and the galaxy power spectrum. We obtain a lower limit of $m_{\mathrm{WDM}}\gtrsim 10\mathrm{keV}$ ($2\sigma$) if the WDM consists of sterile neutrinos and $m_{\mathrm{WDM}}\gtrsim 2\mathrm{keV}$ ($2\sigma$) for early decoupled thermal relics. If we combine this bound with the constraint derived from x-ray flux observations of the Coma cluster, we find that the allowed sterile neutrino mass is $\sim 10\mathrm{keV}$ (in the standard production scenario). Adding constraints based on x-ray fluxes from the Andromeda galaxy, we find that dark matter particles cannot be sterile neutrinos, unless they are produced by a nonstandard mechanism (resonant oscillations, coupling with the inflaton) or get diluted by a large entropy release.