Axion Like Particles and the Inverse Seesaw Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper investigates the role of axion-like particles in explaining astrophysical phenomena and their connection to the inverse seesaw mechanism for neutrino masses, proposing a model with discrete symmetries and gravity considerations.

Contribution

It introduces a restrictive model linking ALPs to the inverse seesaw mechanism, utilizing a scalar field and discrete symmetries to address gravitational effects and anomaly constraints.

Findings

ALPs can explain astrophysical phenomena like universe transparency and gamma-ray excess.

The model constrains the ALP and neutrino mass scales through a scalar field and discrete symmetries.

Gravity-induced operators are suppressed by a discrete gauge symmetry, ensuring theoretical consistency.

Abstract

Light pseudoscalars known as axion like particles (ALPs) may be behind physical phenomena like the Universe transparency to ultra-energetic photons, the soft $\gamma$-ray excess from the Coma cluster, and the 3.5 keV line. We explore the connection of these particles with the inverse seesaw (ISS) mechanism for neutrino mass generation. We propose a very restrictive setting where the scalar field hosting the ALP is also responsible for generating the ISS mass scales through its vacuum expectation value on gravity induced nonrenormalizable operators. A discrete gauge symmetry protects the theory from the appearance of overly strong gravitational effects and discrete anomaly cancellation imposes strong constraints on the order of the group. The anomalous U$(1)$ symmetry leading to the ALP is an extended lepton number and the protective discrete symmetry can be always chosen as a subgroup of a combination of the lepton number and the baryon number.