Exotic Sterile Neutrinos and Pseudo-Goldstone Phenomenology

TL;DR

This paper explores the phenomenology of a GeV-scale sterile neutrino sector and a pseudo-Goldstone boson, highlighting their implications for cosmology, dark matter, and experimental searches.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework linking light sterile neutrinos with a pseudo-Goldstone boson, revealing new observable effects and production mechanisms.

Findings

Potential for sterile neutrino dark matter production via pseudo-Goldstone interactions

Modified Big Bang Nucleosynthesis bounds on sterile neutrinos

Detectable dark radiation signatures in cosmological data

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.