Cosmological Non-Gaussianity from Neutrino Seesaw Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel inflationary model linking the neutrino seesaw mechanism to observable non-Gaussian signatures in the cosmic microwave background, enabling tests of high-scale neutrino physics.

Contribution

It introduces a new framework combining inflation and neutrino seesaw, where Higgs modulated reheating generates detectable non-Gaussianity linked to high-scale neutrino mass generation.

Findings

Non-Gaussian signatures can probe the high scale of neutrino seesaw.

Higgs modulated reheating affects primordial curvature perturbations.

Potential connections between cosmological observations and neutrino physics experiments.

Abstract

The neutrino mass generation via conventional seesaw mechanism is realized at high scales around $O(10^{14})$GeV with natural Yukawa couplings of $O(1)$, making the test of neutrino seesaw a great challenge. It is intriguing to note that the neutrino seesaw scale is typically around the upper range of the cosmological inflation scale. In this work, we propose a new framework incorporating inflation and neutrino seesaw in which the inflaton primarily decays into right-handed neutrinos after inflation. This decay process is governed by the inflaton interaction with the right-handed neutrinos that respects the shift symmetry. With the neutrino seesaw mechanism, we construct a new realization of the Higgs modulated reheating, in which the fluctuations of Higgs field can modulate the inflaton decays and contribute to the primordial curvature perturbation. We investigate the induced non-Gaussian signatures and demonstrate, for the first time, that such signatures provide an important means to directly probe the high scale of natural neutrino seesaw. We further analyze the interplay of the non-Gaussianity signatures with the low-energy neutrino experiments, and their interplay with the Higgs self-coupling measurements at the LHC and future colliders.