English

Probing the Seesaw Mechanism with Cosmological Data

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2020-07-13 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We investigate cosmological consequences of an inflationary model which incorporates a generic seesaw extension (types I and II) of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. A non-minimal coupling between the inflaton field and the Ricci scalar is considered as well as radiative corrections at one loop order. This connection between the inflationary dynamics with neutrino physics results in a predictive model whose observational viability is investigated in light of the current cosmic microwave background data, baryon acoustic oscillation observations and type Ia supernovae measurements. Our results show that the non-minimal coupled seesaw potential provides a good description of the observational data when radiative corrections are positive. Such result favours the type II seesaw mechanism over type I and may be an indication for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.05154,
  title  = {Probing the Seesaw Mechanism with Cosmological Data},
  author = {J. G. Rodrigues and Micol Benetti and Marcela Campista and Jailson Alcaniz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.05154},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

17 pages, 8 figures. References added, typos corrected. Matches version published in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:39:57.913Z