Scalar dark matter and leptogenesis in the minimal scotogenic model

Abstract

We study the minimal scotogenic model constituting an additional inert Higgs doublet and three sets of right-handed neutrinos. The scotogenic model connects dark matter, baryon asymmetry of the Universe and neutrino oscillation data. In our work, we obtain baryogenesis by the decay of TeV scale heavy neutral singlet fermion (N2). We primarily focus on the intermediate-mass region of dark matter within MW<MDM≤550 GeV, where observed relic density is suppressed due to co-annihilation processes. We consider thermal as well as the non-thermal approach of dark matter production and explore the possibility of the lightest stable candidate being a dark matter candidate. Within the inert Higgs doublet (IHD) desert, we explore a new allowed region of dark matter masses for the non-thermal generation of dark matter with a mass splitting of 10 GeV among the inert scalars. We also see the variation of relic abundance for unequal mass splitting among the scalars. The KamLand-Zen bound on the effective mass of the active neutrinos is also verified in this study.