English

About electroweak domain walls in Majoron models

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-05-26 v4 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Some time ago it was claimed in "Spontaneous Breaking of Lepton Number and Cosmological Domain Wall Problem" (Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 151301 (2019)) that non perturbative instantons of the weak interaction SU(2)W\text{SU}(2)_\text{W} lead to the formation of domain walls in Majoron models owing to the anomaly of the spontaneously broken global lepton number LL symmetry U(1)L\text{U}(1)_L with respect to SU(2)W\text{SU}(2)_\text{W}. We point out that it has long been known, that this effect can be completely rotated away unless there is a source of explicit B+LB+L breaking present, where BB denotes baryon number. We further estimate the tiny instanton induced Majoron mass from B+LB+L breaking and analyze the cosmological impact of such domain walls including possible finite temperature effects. In general this scenario does not lead to a cosmological catastrophe and we demonstrate that the tiny instanton induced mass can act as a bias term to collapse walls induced by a larger source of lepton number breaking. Alternatively this electroweak Majoron could act as dynamical dark energy.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.02910,
  title  = {About electroweak domain walls in Majoron models},
  author = {Maximilian Berbig},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.02910},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

v1: 5 pages + 1 figure, Comments are always welcome! v2: clarifications and references added, v3: mistake about sphalerons corrected, added discussion about bias term and dynamical dark energy, matches published version, v4: erratum added as appendix, conclusions unchanged

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:57:01.925Z