Dominant Thermal Resonant Mechanism for Low-Scale Leptogenesis

Abstract

We explicitly demonstrate the importance of a new thermal resonant channel in the context of low-scale leptogenesis, which goes beyond the well-known mixing and oscillation of massive singlet neutrinos. This new channel is always present when considering the thermally-induced Higgs decay to leptons and relativistic singlet neutrinos, and can become dominant thanks to thermally-generated resonant lepton-doublet flavour coherences. This mechanism, which we call Thermal Resonant Leptogenesis (TRL), can yield the observed baryon asymmetry in our universe, even if there is no resonant enhancement from quasi-degenerate sterile neutrinos. The required active-to-sterile neutrino mixing for TRL differs from other known low-scale leptogenesis scenarios and can be probed in fixed-target and long-lived particle experiments, and by displaced vertex searches at high-energy colliders.

Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures, improved to align with the companion paper arXiv:2604.06493