Gravitational waves from neutrino mass genesis

Abstract

The discovery of gravitational waves opens new opportunities to test BSM physics. In particular, the production of a stochastic background of primordial gravitational waves could provide a signature of the generation of the right-right Majorana neutrino mass term necessary, within type-I seesaw mechanism, to explain lightness of neutrinos and their mixing parameters. I will discuss the possibility that such a generation occurs during a strong first order phase transition within Majoron models [1]. As well known, this can indeed produce a stochastic background of gravitational waves. The scale of the phase transition can or cannot coincide with the seesaw scale. In the latter case a low scale phase transition, occurring in the pre-recombination era, might be tested at very low frequencies ($10^{-9}$--$10^{-6}\mathrm{Hz}$). Even though the signal can hardly reproduce the NANOGrac putative signal such new physics at low scale might help ameliorating the tensions in the $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model (e.g., the Hubble tension). I will also discuss how a phase transition might be responsible for the generation of dark matter in the form of dark neutrinos coupling to the seesaw neutrinos via Higgs induced right handed-right handed neutrino mixing [2].

Comments: 19 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the Corfu Summer Institute 2021