Probing thermal leptogenesis and dark matter through primordial gravitational waves from a supercooled universe
Abstract
We explore the cosmological dynamics of a supercooled first-order phase transition in the classically conformal extension of the Standard Model, where radiative symmetry breaking simultaneously generates the right-handed neutrino (RHN) masses, and a strong stochastic gravitational-wave (GW) background. The slow decay of the scalar field into RHNs can induce an early matter-dominated (EMD) era whose duration is sensitive to the RHN mass and gauge coupling . This non-standard cosmological phase reshapes the GW spectrum and leaves a distinctive RHN-mass-dependent spectral distortion that correlates with the flavour regime of thermal leptogenesis. Within this framework, one RHN can serve as a dark matter candidate produced nonthermally from scalar decays, while the remaining states generate the baryon asymmetry via thermal leptogenesis. For , we identify such a parameter region, and show that with singlet extensions, even with a smaller gauge coupling, one can realise this mechanism for the three-flavour regime. The resulting GW signals, amplified by supercooling and modified by EMD, provide a unique window to probe the scale and flavour structure of leptogenesis in future high-frequency GW observations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.10288,
title = {Probing thermal leptogenesis and dark matter through primordial gravitational waves from a supercooled universe},
author = {Peter Athron and Satyabrata Datta and Zhao-Yang Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.10288},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
25 pages, 4 figures, Comments are welcome