A little theory of everything, with heavy neutral leptons

Abstract

Abstract Recently a new model of “Affleck-Dine inflation” was presented, that produces the baryon asymmetry from a complex inflaton carrying baryon number, while being consistent with constraints from the cosmic microwave background. We adapt this model such that the inflaton carries lepton number, and communicates the lepton asymmetry to the standard model baryons via quasi-Dirac heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) and sphalerons. One of these HNLs, with mass < ~ $$ \underset{\sim }{<} $$ 4.5 GeV, can be (partially) asymmetric dark matter (DM), whose asymmetry is determined by that of the baryons. Its stability is directly related to the vanishing of the lightest neutrino mass. Neutrino masses are generated by integrating out heavy sterile neutrinos whose mass is above the inflation scale. The model provides an economical origin for all of the major ingredients missing from the standard model: inflation, baryogenesis, neutrino masses, and dark matter. The HNLs can be probed in fixed-target experiments like SHiP, possibly manifesting N − N ¯ $$ N-\overline{N} $$ oscillations. A light singlet scalar, needed for depleting the DM symmetric component, can be discovered in beam dump experiments and searches for rare decays, possibly explaining anomalous events recently observed by the KOTO collaboration. The DM HNL is strongly constrained by direct searches, and could have a cosmologically interesting self-interaction cross section.

Keywords

• Cosmology of Theories beyond the SM
• Neutrino Physics