A theory for scotogenic dark matter stabilised by residual gauge symmetry

Abstract

Dark matter stability can result from a residual matter-parity symmetry, following naturally from the spontaneous breaking of the gauge symmetry. Here we explore this idea in the context of the $\mathrm{SU}(3{)}_{\mathrm{c}}\otimes \mathrm{SU}(3{)}_{\mathrm{L}}\otimes \mathrm{U}(1{)}_{\mathrm{X}}\otimes \mathrm{U}(1{)}_{\mathrm{N}}$ electroweak extension of the standard model. The key feature of our new scotogenic dark matter theory is the use of a triplet scalar boson with anti-symmetric Yukawa couplings. This naturally implies that one of the light neutrinos is massless and, as a result, there is a lower bound for the $0\nu \beta \beta$ decay rate.

Comments: Published in PLB. 14 pages, 3 figures, 1 table