Neutrino Masses from Outer Space

Abstract

Neutrinos can gain mass from coupling to an ultralight field in slow roll. When such a field is displaced from its minimum, its vev acts just like the Higgs vev in spontaneous symmetry breaking. Although these masses may eventually vanish, they do it over a very long time. The theory is technically natural, with the ultralight field-dependent part being the right-handed Majorana mass. The mass variation induced by the field correlates with the cosmological evolution. The change of the mass term changes the mixing matrix, and therefore suppresses the fraction of sterile neutrinos at earlier times and increases it at later times. Since the issue of quantum gravity corrections to field theories with large field variations remains open, this framework may give an observational handle on the Weak Gravity Conjecture.

9 pages LaTeX, 4 figures; v3: additional comments to match the published version

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Early dark energy from massive neutrinos -- a natural resolution of the Hubble tension
• Tensions in the dark: shedding light on Dark Matter-Dark Energy interactions
• Long Range Interactions in Cosmology: Implications for Neutrinos
• Hot New Early Dark Energy
• Hot New Early Dark Energy: Towards a Unified Dark Sector of Neutrinos, Dark Energy and Dark Matter
• Reconstruction of the neutrino mass as a function of redshift
• Charting the Fifth Force Landscape
• Cosmological Unification, Dark Energy and the Origin of Neutrino Mass