Gravitational waves from seesaw assisted collapsing domain walls

Abstract

Spontaneous breaking of discrete symmetries like $Z_2$ leads to the formation of stable topological defects such as domain walls which, if allowed to dominate, can potentially be in conflict with cosmological observations. Incorporating explicit $Z_2$-breaking bias terms can lead to annihilation of such walls while also emitting stochastic gravitational waves (GW). We study the role of heavy right-handed neutrinos present in the type-I seesaw framework to generate such a bias term via quantum corrections. This offers interesting correlations among the seesaw scale, GW peak amplitude and peak frequency which can be probed at present and future experiments related to GW as well as precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In flavor symmetric UV complete scenarios with degenerate RHNs at leading order, such tiny coupling of RHNs to a $Z_2$-odd scalar can also lead to small mass splittings suitable for explaining the observed baryon asymmetry of the universe via resonant leptogenesis.

Comments: 9 pages, 3 captioned figures, matches version accepted for publication in Physics Letters B