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Title: Decaying majoron dark matter and neutrino masses

Journal Article · · AIP Conference Proceedings
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2836988· OSTI ID:21043512
 [1]
  1. Oxford Astrophysics, Denis Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, OX1 3RH, Oxford (United Kingdom)

We review our recent proposal of the majoron as a suitable warm dark matter candidate. The majoron is the Goldstone boson associated to the spontaneous breaking of ungauged lepton number, one of the mechanisms proposed to give rise to neutrino masses. The majoron can acquire a mass through quantum gravity effects, and can possibly account for the observed dark matter component of the Universe. We present constraints on the majoron lifetime, mass and abundance obtained by the analysis of the cosmic microwave background data. We find that, in the case of thermal production, the limits for the majoron mass read 0.12 keV<mJ<0.17 keV, and discuss how these limits are modified in the non-thermal case. The majoron lifetime {tau} is constrained to be > or approx. 250 Gyr. We also apply this results to a given seesaw model for the generation of neutrino masses, and find that this constraints the energy scale for the lepton number breaking phase transition to be > or approx. 10{sup 6} GeV. We thus find that the majoron decaying dark matter (DDM) scenario fits nicely in models where neutrino masses arise a la seesaw, and may lead to other possible cosmological implications.

OSTI ID:
21043512
Journal Information:
AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 966, Issue 1; Conference: 4. Italian-Sino workshop on relativistic astrophysics, Pescara (Italy), 20-28 Jul 2007; Other Information: DOI: 10.1063/1.2836988; (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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