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Title: A cosmological sandwiched window for lepton-number breaking scale
Abstract A singlet majoron can arise from the seesaw framework as a pseudo-Goldstone boson when the heavy Majorana neutrinos acquire masses via the spontaneous breaking of global U(1)Lsymmetry. The resulting cosmological impacts are usually derived from the effective majoron-neutrino interaction, and the majoron abundance is accumulated through the freeze-in neutrino coalescence. However, a primordial majoron abundance can be predicted in a minimal setup and lead to distinctive cosmological effects. In this work, we consider such a primordial majoron abundance from relativistic freeze-out and calculate the modification to the effective neutrino numberNeff. We demonstrate that the measurements ofNeffwill constrain the parameter space from a primordial majoron abundance in an opposite direction to that from neutrino coalescence. When the contributions from both the primordial abundance and the freeze-in production coexist, the U(1)L-breaking scale (seesaw scale)fwill be pushed into a “sandwiched window”. Remarkably, for majoron masses below 1 MeV and above the eV scale, the future CMB-S4 experiment will completely close such a low-scale seesaw window forf∈ [1,105] GeV. We highlight that any new light particle with a primordial abundance that couples to Standard Model particles may lead to a similar sandwiched window, and such a general phenomenon deserves careful investigation.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2309456
PAR ID:
10521453
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2024/04/047
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Volume:
2024
Issue:
04
ISSN:
1475-7516
Page Range / eLocation ID:
047
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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