TeV-scale unification of light dark matter and neutrino mass
Abstract
We demonstrate that TeV-scale heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) responsible for inverse-seesaw neutrino mass generation can simultaneously fix the cosmological abundance and decay properties of dark matter (DM). The spontaneous breaking of lepton number gives rise to a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson that serves as a light DM candidate, whose mass originates from a small explicit symmetry-breaking term. The same HNLs that generate neutrino masses produce the DM via freeze-in and mediate its decay into neutrinos, leading to a tight correlation among neutrino masses, DM relic abundance, and DM lifetime. For collider-accessible TeV-scale HNLs, the observed relic density and lifetime constraints point to sub-GeV DM, yielding observable neutrino signals at JUNO and next-generation detectors such as Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE. This framework establishes a predictive and experimentally testable link between neutrino mass generation and DM.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.05200,
title = {TeV-scale unification of light dark matter and neutrino mass},
author = {Cheng-Wei Chiang and Shu-Yu Ho and Van Que Tran},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05200},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
10 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, typos are corrected, references are added, some content and equations are moved to the Supplemental Material, and discussion for the collider-probe of the model is extended