Exotic Sterile Neutrinos and Pseudo-Goldstone Phenomenology

Abstract

We study the phenomenology of a light (GeV scale) sterile neutrino sector and the pseudo-Goldstone boson (not the majoron) associated with a global symmetry in this sector that is broken at a high scale. Such scenarios can be motivated from considerations of singlet fermions from a hidden sector coupling to active neutrinos via heavy right-handed seesaw neutrinos, effectively giving rise to a secondary, low-energy seesaw framework. Such scenarios allow for rich phenomenology with observable implications for cosmology, dark matter, and direct searches, involving novel sterile neutrino dark matter production mechanisms from the pseudo-Goldstone-mediated scattering or decay, modifications of BBN bounds on sterile neutrinos, suppression of canonical sterile neutrino decay channels at direct search experiments, late injection of an additional population of neutrinos in the Universe after neutrino decoupling, and measurable dark radiation at BBN or CMB decoupling.

7 pages, 3 figures. References updated. Matches published version in JHEP

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• Probing Light Mediators in the Radiative Emission of Neutrino Pair
• Efficiently Exploring Multi-Dimensional Parameter Spaces Beyond the Standard Model
• Wobbly Dark Matter Signals at Cherenkov Telescopes from Long Lived Mediator Decays
• Dark Matter Freeze-In with a Heavy Mediator: Beyond the EFT Approach