Low-scale Seesaw Models Research Articles

Testing the low scale seesaw and leptogenesis

Heavy neutrinos with masses below the electroweak scale can simultaneously generate the light neutrino masses via the seesaw mechanism and the baryon asymmetry of the universe via leptogenesis. The requirement to explain these phenomena imposes constraints on the mass spectrum of the heavy neutrinos, their flavour mixing pattern and their CP properties. We first combine bounds from different experiments in the past to map the viable parameter regions in which the minimal low scale seesaw model can explain the observed neutrino oscillations, while being consistent with the negative results of past searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. We then study which additional predictions for the properties of the heavy neutrinos can be made based on the requirement to explain the observed baryon asymmetry of the universe. Finally, we comment on the perspectives to find traces of heavy neutrinos in future experimental searches at the LHC, NA62, BELLE II, T2K, SHiP or a future high energy collider, such as ILC, CEPC or FCC-ee. If any heavy neutral leptons are discovered in the future, our results can be used to assess whether these particles are indeed the common origin of the light neutrino masses and the baryon asymmetry of the universe. If the magnitude of their couplings to all Standard Model flavours can be measured individually, and if the Dirac phase in the lepton mixing matrix is determined in neutrino oscillation experiments, then all model parameters can in principle be determined from this data. This makes the low scale seesaw a fully testable model of neutrino masses and baryogenesis.

Probing left-right seesaw models using beam polarization at an e+e− collider

We show that the longitudinal beam polarization option at a future electron-positron collider provides an unambiguous distinction between low-scale seesaw models of neutrino mass. This is possible due to the fact that the pair production cross section of the heavy neutrinos in seesaw models is sensitive to the polarization of the initial lepton beams, and for a suitable choice of the polarization, shows a clear enhancement over the unpolarized cross section. More interestingly, the choice of the beam polarization for which the enhancement is maximum is governed by the size of the light-heavy neutrino mixing parameter. We also find that using this effect, one can probe a previously uncharted parameter space of the left-right seesaw model, which is complementary to the existing searches at both energy and intensity frontiers.

Effective lepton flavor violating Hℓiℓj vertex from right-handed neutrinos within the mass insertion approximation

In this work we present a new computation of the lepton flavor violating Higgs boson decays that are generated radiatively to one-loop from heavy right-handed neutrinos. We work within the context of the inverse seesaw model with three $\nu_R$ and three extra singlets $X$, but the results could be generalized to other low scale seesaw models. The novelty of our computation is that it uses a completely different method by means of the mass insertion approximation which works with the electroweak interaction states instead of the usual 9 physical neutrino mass eigenstates of the inverse seesaw model. This method also allows us to write the analytical results explicitly in terms of the most relevant model parameters, that are the neutrino Yukawa coupling matrix $Y_\nu$ and the right-handed mass matrix $M_R$, which is very convenient for a phenomenological analysis. This $Y_\nu$ matrix, being generically nondiagonal in flavor space, is the only responsible for the induced charged lepton flavor violating processes of our interest. We perform the calculation of the decay amplitude up to order ${\cal O}(Y_\nu^2+Y_\nu^4)$. We also study numerically the goodness of the mass insertion approximation results. In the last part we present the computation of the relevant one-loop effective vertex $H\ell_i\ell_j$ for the lepton flavor violating Higgs decay which is derived from a large $M_R$ mass expansion of the form factors. We believe that our simple formula found for this effective vertex can be of interest for other researchers who wish to estimate the $H \to \ell_i \bar \ell_j$ rates in a fast way in terms of their own preferred input values for the relevant model parameters $Y_\nu$ and $M_R$.

Lepton flavor violating Z decays: A promising window to low scale seesaw neutrinos

In this paper we study the Lepton Flavor Violating $Z$ boson decays $Z \to \tau \mu$ and $Z \to \tau e$ in the context of low scale seesaw models with new heavy Majorana neutrinos whose masses could be reachable at the LHC. Our computations of the decay rates are done in the particular realization given by the Inverse Seesaw Model with six extra heavy neutrinos which are quasi-degenerate in three pseudo-Dirac pairs. In particular, we focus on scenarios that are built ad-hoc to produce suppressed rates in all the processes involving $\mu$-$e$ transitions, given the fact that these are by far the most strongly constrained by present data. We will fully explore the $Z \to \tau \mu$ and $Z \to \tau e$ rates, together with a set of observables that we find to be the most constraining ones, and we will conclude that sizable rates of up to $2 \times 10^{-7}$, accessible at future colliders, can be reached in this model for Majorana masses in the few TeV range, potentially reachable at LHC.

The triple Higgs coupling: a new probe of low-scale seesaw models

The measure of the triple Higgs coupling is one of the major goals of the high-luminosity run of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) as well as the future colliders, either leptonic such as the International Linear Collider (ILC) or hadronic such as the 100 TeV Future Circular Collider in hadron-hadron mode (FCC-hh). We have recently proposed this observable as a test of neutrino mass generating mechanisms in a regime where heavy sterile neutrino masses are hard to be probed otherwise. We present in this article a study of the one-loop corrected triple Higgs coupling in the inverse seesaw model, taking into account all relevant constraints on the model. This is the first study of the impact on the triple Higgs coupling of heavy neutrinos in a realistic, renormalizable neutrino mass model. We obtain deviations from the Standard Model as large as to ∼ +30% that are at the current limit of the HL-LHC sensitivity, but would be clearly visible at the ILC or at the FCC-hh.

Flavour violating lepton decays in low-scale seesaws

We present the first complete calculation of flavour violating lepton decays taking into account all supersymmetric (SUSY) and non-SUSY contributions in the context of the supersymmetric inverse seesaw, a specific SUSY low-scale seesaw model. We consider radiative and 3-body lepton decays as well as neutrinoless μ−e conversion in muonic atoms and perform a full one-loop calculation in the mass basis. Taking CMSSM-like boundary conditions for the soft SUSY breaking parameters, we find that cancellations between different contributions are present in several regions, which might reduce the branching ratios by as much as one order of magnitude. This has important consequences when translating current measurements into constraints and estimating the reach of future experiments, and justifies the use of a full calculation. We also show that the ratio of different cross-sections can discriminate between dominant SUSY or non-SUSY contributions.

On the stability of the electroweak vacuum in the presence of low-scale seesaw models

The scale of neutrino masses and the Planck scale are separated by more than twenty-seven order of magnitudes. However, they can be linked by imposing the stability of the electroweak (EW) vacuum. The crucial ingredient is provided by the generation of neutrino masses via a seesaw mechanism triggered by Yukawa interactions between the standard model (SM) Higgs and lepton doublets and additional heavy right-handed neutrinos. These neutrinos participate to the renormalization group (RG) running of the dimensionless SM couplings, affecting their high-energy behavior. The Higgs quartic coupling is dragged towards negative values, thus altering the stability of the EW vacuum. In the usual type-I seesaw model, this effect is too small to be a threat since, in order to comply with low-energy neutrino data, one is forced to consider either too small Yukawa couplings or too heavy right-handed neutrinos. In this paper we explore this general idea in the context of low-scale seesaw models. These models are characterized by sizable Yukawa couplings and right-handed neutrinos with mass of the order of the EW scale, thus maximizing their impact on the RG flow. As a general result, we find that Yukawa couplings such that Tr $$ \left({Y}_{{}^v}^{\dagger }{Y}_v\right) $$ ≳ 0.4 are excluded. We discuss the impact of this bound on several observables, with a special focus on the lepton flavor violating process μ → eγ and the neutrino-less double beta decay.

Lepton Flavor Violation beyond the MSSM

Most extensions of the Standard Model lepton sector predict large lepton flavor violating rates. Given the promising experimental perspectives for lepton flavor violation in the next few years, this generic expectation might offer a powerful indirect probe to look for new physics. In this review we will cover several aspects of lepton flavor violation in supersymmetric models beyond the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. In particular, we will concentrate on three different scenarios: high-scale and low-scale seesaw models as well as models withR-parity violation. We will see that in some cases the LFV phenomenology can have characteristic features for specific scenarios, implying that dedicated studies must be performed in order to correctly understand the phenomenology in nonminimal supersymmetric models.

Lepton flavor violation in low-scale seesaw models: SUSY and non-SUSY contributions

Taking the supersymmetric inverse seesaw mechanism as the explanation for neutrino oscillation data, we investigate charged lepton flavor violation in radiative and 3-body lepton decays as well as in neutrinoless $\mu-e$ conversion in muonic atoms. In contrast to former studies, we take into account all possible contributions: supersymmetric as well as non-supersymmetric. We take CMSSM-like boundary conditions for the soft supersymmetry breaking parameters. We find several regions where cancellations between various contributions exist, reducing the lepton flavor violating rates by an order of magnitude compared to the case where only the dominant contribution is taken into account. This is in particular important for the correct interpretation of existing data as well as for estimating the reach of near future experiments where the sensitivity will be improved by one to two orders of magnitude. Moreover, we demonstrate that ratios like BR($\tau\to 3 \mu$)/BR($\tau\to \mu e^+ e^-$) can be used to determine whether the supersymmetric contributions dominate over the $W^\pm$ and $H^\pm$ contributions or vice versa.

Threshold effects and renormalization group evolution of neutrino parameters in TeV scale seesaw models

We consider the threshold effect on the renormalization group (RG) evolution of the neutrino masses and mixing angles in TeV scale seesaw models. We obtain the analytic expressions using the factorization method in the presence of threshold effects. We also perform numerical study of RG effects in two specific low scale seesaw models following the bottom-up approach and ascertain the role of seesaw thresholds in altering the values of masses and mixing angles during RG evolution.

Decoupling of heavy sneutrinos in low-scale seesaw models

There have been some recent claims in the literature about large right-handed sneutrinos contributions to lepton flavor violating observables like $\mu \to 3e$ or $\mu - e$ conversion in nuclei in supersymmetric low-scale seesaw models. These large contributions originate from $Z$-penguin diagrams which show a much weaker dependence on the heavy masses than the photonic contributions. We have traced this to an error in the evaluation of the corresponding loop amplitudes which has propagated in the literature. We explicitly show that after correcting this mistake the $Z$-penguins show the expected decoupling behavior. Moreover, the reported dominance of the $Z$-penguin over the photonic contributions disappears as well.

Low-scale seesaw models versusNeff

We consider the contribution of the extra sterile states in generic low-scale seesaw models to extra radiation, parametrized by $N_{\rm eff}$. We find that the value of $N_{\rm eff}$ is roughly independent of the seesaw scale within a wide range. We explore the full parameter space in the case of two extra sterile states and find that these models are strongly constrained by cosmological data for any value of the seesaw scale below ${\mathcal O}(100$MeV).

Low-scale neutrino seesaw mechanism and scalar dark matter

We discuss how two birds—the little hierarchy problem of low-scale type-I seesaw models and the search for a viable dark matter candidate—are (proverbially) killed by one stone: a new inert scalar state.

Lepton dipole moments in supersymmetric low-scale seesaw models

We study the anomalous magnetic and electric dipole moments of charged leptons in supersymmetric low-scale seesaw models with right-handed neutrino superfields. We consider a minimally extended framework of minimal supergravity, by assuming that CP violation originates from complex soft SUSY-breaking bilinear and trilinear couplings associated with the right-handed sneutrino sector. We present numerical estimates of the muon anomalous magnetic moment and the electron electric dipole moment (EDM), as functions of key model parameters, such as the Majorana mass scale mN and tan(\beta). In particular, we find that the contributions of the singlet heavy neutrinos and sneutrinos to the electron EDM are naturally small in this model, of order 10^{-27} - 10^{-28} e cm, and can be probed in the present and future experiments.

Charged lepton flavor violation in supersymmetric low-scale seesaw models

We study charged lepton flavour violation in low-scale seesaw models of minimal supergravity, which realize large neutrino Yukawa couplings thanks to approximate lepton-number symmetries. There are two dominant sources of lepton flavour violation in such models. The first source originates from the usual soft supersymmetry-breaking sector, whilst the second one is entirely supersymmetric and comes from the supersymmetric neutrino Yukawa sector. Within the framework of minimal supergravity, we consider both sources of lepton flavour violation, soft and supersymmetric, and calculate a number of possible lepton-flavour-violating transitions, such as the photonic decays of muons and taus, mu -> e gamma, tau -> e gamma and tau -> mu gamma, their neutrinoless three-body decays, mu -> e e e, tau -> e e e, tau -> mu mu mu, tau -> e e mu and tau -> e mu mu, and the coherent mu -> e conversion in nuclei. After taking into account the exclusion bounds placed by present experiments of lepton flavour violation, we derive combined theoretical limits on the universal heavy Majorana mass scale mN and the light-to-heavy neutrino mixings. Supersymmetric low-scale seesaw models offer distinct correlated predictions for lepton-flavour-violating signatures, which might be discovered in current and projected experiments, such as MEG, COMET/PRISM, Mu2e, super-BELLE and LHCb.

Impact of massive neutrinos on the Higgs self-coupling and electroweak vacuum stability

The presence of right-handed neutrinos in the type I seesaw mechanism may lead to significant corrections to the RG evolution of the Higgs self-coupling. Compared to the Standard Model case, the Higgs mass window can become narrower, and the cutoff scale become lower. Naively, these effects decrease with decreasing right-handed neutrino mass. However, we point out that the unknown Dirac Yukawa matrix may impact the vacuum stability constraints even in the low scale seesaw case not far away from the electroweak scale, hence much below the canonical seesaw scale of 10^15 GeV. This includes situations in which production of right-handed neutrinos at colliders is possible. We illustrate this within a particular parametrization of the Dirac Yukawas and with explicit low scale seesaw models. We also note the effect of massive neutrinos on the top quark Yukawa coupling, whose high energy value can be increased with respect to the Standard Model case.

Charged LFV in a low-scale see-saw mSUGRA model

We investigate the influence of the boundary conditions of minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) on the supersymmetric mechanism for lepton flavour violation (LFV) proposed recently [1], within the framework of the MSSM extended by TeV-scale singlet heavy neutrinos. We find that the consideration of the mSUGRA boundary condition may increase the branching ratios of the muon and tauon decaying into three charged leptons by up to a factor of 5, whereas the corresponding branching ratio for their photonic decays remains almost unchanged.

Threshold effects on renormalization group running of neutrino parameters in the low-scale seesaw model

We show that, in the low-scale type-I seesaw model, renormalization group running of neutrino parameters may lead to significant modifications of the leptonic mixing angles in view of so-called seesaw threshold effects. Especially, we derive analytical formulas for radiative corrections to neutrino parameters in crossing the different seesaw thresholds, and show that there may exist enhancement factors efficiently boosting the renormalization group running of the leptonic mixing angles. We find that, as a result of the seesaw threshold corrections to the leptonic mixing angles, various flavor symmetric mixing patterns (e.g., bi-maximal and tri-bimaximal mixing patterns) can be easily accommodated at relatively low energy scales, which is well within the reach of running and forthcoming experiments (e.g., the LHC).

Non-unitarity of the leptonic mixing matrix in the TeV-scale type-I seesaw model

The non-unitarity effects in leptonic flavor mixing are regarded as one of the generic features of the type-I seesaw model. Therefore, we explore these effects in the TeV-scale type-I seesaw model, and show that there exist non-trivial correlations among the non-unitarity parameters, stemming from the typical flavor structure of the low-scale seesaw model. In general, it follows from analytical discussions and numerical results that all the six non-unitarity parameters are related to three model parameters, while the widely studied parameters ηeτ and ημτ cannot be phenomenologically significant simultaneously.

Supersymmetric lepton flavor violation in low-scale seesaw models

We study a new supersymmetric mechanism for lepton flavor violation in $\ensuremath{\mu}$ and $\ensuremath{\tau}$ decays and $\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}e$ conversion in nuclei, within a minimal extension of the minimal supersymmetric standard model with low-mass heavy singlet neutrinos and sneutrinos. We find that the decays $\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}e\ensuremath{\gamma}$, $\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}e\ensuremath{\gamma}$ and $\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\gamma}$ are forbidden in the supersymmetric limit of the theory, whereas other processes, such as $\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}eee$, $\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}e$ conversion, $\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}eee$ and $\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}e\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\mu}$, are allowed and can be dramatically enhanced several orders of magnitude above the observable level by potentially large neutrino Yukawa coupling effects. The profound implications of supersymmetric lepton flavor violation for present and future experiments are discussed.