Soft leptogenesis in the inverse seesaw model

Abstract

We consider leptogenesis induced by soft supersymmetry breaking terms ("soft leptogenesis"), in the context of the inverse seesaw mechanism. In this model there are lepton number (L) conserving and L-violating soft supersymmetry-breaking B-terms involving the singlet sneutrinos which, together with the -- generically small-- L-violating parameter responsible of the neutrino mass, give a small mass splitting between the four singlet sneutrino states of a single generation. In combination with the trilinear soft supersymmetry breaking terms they also provide new CP violating phases needed to generate a lepton asymmetry in the singlet sneutrino decays. We obtain that in this scenario the lepton asymmetry is proportional to the L-conserving soft supersymmetry-breaking B-term, and it is not suppressed by the L-violating parameters. Consequently we find that, as in the standard see-saw case, this mechanism can lead to sucessful leptogenesis only for relatively small value of the relevant soft bilinear coupling. The right-handed neutrino masses can be sufficiently low to elude the gravitino problem. Also the corresponding Yukawa couplings involving the lightest of the right-handed neutrinos are constrained to be \sum |Y_{1k}|^2\lesssim 10^{-7} which generically implies that the neutrino mass spectrum has to be strongly hierarchical.