Species scale associated with Weinberg operator and bound on Majorana neutrino mass

Abstract

When states in a tower like the Kaluza-Klein or the string tower couple to another state through the irrelevant operators of the same type, their contributions to the loop corrections of the relevant or the marginal operators are not negligible, threatening the perturbativity. This can be avoided provided the cutoff scale is lower than the species scale associated with the irrelevant operator. We apply this to towers of states associated with the neutrino which couple to the Higgs through the Weinberg operator, the dimension-5 irrelevant operator generating the Majorana neutrino mass. Requiring the `Majorana species scale', the species scale associated with the Weinberg operator, to be below the gravitational species scale, one finds the lower bound on the Majorana neutrino mass determined by the species number. The Festina-Lente bound also gives the lower bound on the Majorana neutrino mass, but it is not so stringent. Meanwhile, even if the neutrino mass is of the Dirac type at the renormalizable level, the Majorana mass term still can be written in the effective field theory action so far as the Weinberg operator is not forbidden. Even if the Majorana neutrino mass is larger than the Dirac one, so far as there are sufficient degrees of freedom with mass smaller than the scale of the cosmological constant, the observation of the Majorana nature of the neutrino may not contradict to quantum gravity constraints which rules out the neutrino mass purely given by the Majorana type.

17 pages, 3 figures, version published in JHEP

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