The minimal scenario of leptogenesis

We review the main features and results of thermal leptogenesis within the type I seesaw mechanism, the minimal extension of the Standard Model explaining neutrino masses and mixing. After presenting the simplest approach, the vanilla scenario, we discuss various important developments in recent years, such as the inclusion of lepton and heavy neutrino flavour effects, a description beyond a hierarchical heavy neutrino mass spectrum and an improved kinetic description within the density matrix and the closed-time-path formalisms. We also discuss how leptogenesis can ultimately represent an important phenomenological tool to test the seesaw mechanism and the underlying model of new physics.Comment: 37 pages, 4 figures; invited review chapter for the "Focus on the Origin of Matter" issue published in the New Journal of Physic

Jet substructure shedding light on heavy Majorana neutrinos at the LHC

The existence of tiny neutrino masses and flavor mixings can be explained naturally in various seesaw models, many of which typically having additional Majorana type SM gauge singlet right handed neutrinos ($N$). If they are at around the electroweak scale and furnished with sizeable mixings with light active neutrinos, they can be produced at high energy colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A characteristic signature would be same sign lepton pairs, violating lepton number, together with light jets -- $pp\to N\ell^{\pm}, \; N\to\ell^{\pm}W^{\mp}, \; W^{\mp}\to jj$. We propose a new search strategy utilising jet substructure techniques, observing that for a heavy right handed neutrino mass $M_N$ much above $M_{W^\pm}$, the two jets coming out of the boosted $W^\pm$ may be interpreted as a single fat-jet ($J$). Hence, the distinguishing signal topology will be $\ell^{\pm}\ell^{\pm} J$. Performing a comprehensive study of the different signal regions along with complete background analysis, in tandem with detector level simulations, we compute statistical significance limits. We find that heavy neutrinos can be explored effectively for mass ranges $300$ GeV $\leq M_N \leq 800$ GeV and different light-heavy neutrino mixing $|V_{\mu N}|^{2}$. At the 13 TeV LHC with 3000 $\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ integrated luminosity one can competently explore mixing angles much below present LHC limits, and moreover exceed bounds from electroweak precision data.Comment: Accepted for publication in JHEP. 25 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Disambiguating Seesaw Models using Invariant Mass Variables at Hadron Colliders

We propose ways to distinguish between different mechanisms behind the collider signals of TeV-scale seesaw models for neutrino masses using kinematic endpoints of invariant mass variables. We particularly focus on two classes of such models widely discussed in literature: (i) Standard Model extended by the addition of singlet neutrinos and (ii) Left-Right Symmetric Models. Relevant scenarios involving the same "smoking-gun" collider signature of dilepton plus dijet with no missing transverse energy differ from one another by their event topology, resulting in distinctive relationships among the kinematic endpoints to be used for discerning them at hadron colliders. These kinematic endpoints are readily translated to the mass parameters of the on-shell particles through simple analytic expressions which can be used for measuring the masses of the new particles. A Monte Carlo simulation with detector effects is conducted to test the viability of the proposed strategy in a realistic environment. Finally, we discuss the future prospects of testing these scenarios at the $\sqrt s=14$ and 100 TeV hadron colliders.Comment: 35 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables; minor changes, accepted for publication in JHE

Sterile Neutrinos and B-L Symmetry

We revisit the relation between the neutrino masses and the spontaneous breaking of the B-L gauge symmetry. We discuss the main scenarios for Dirac and Majorana neutrinos and point out two simple mechanisms for neutrino masses. In this context the neutrino masses can be generated either at tree level or at quantum level and one predicts the existence of very light sterile neutrinos with masses below the eV scale. The predictions for lepton number violating processes such as mu to e and mu to e gamma are discussed in detail. The impact from the cosmological constraints on the effective number of relativistic degree of freedom is investigated.Comment: v2 new section for the LFV processes, minor corrections, main conclusion unchanged, version to appear in Physics Letters

Phenomenology of Light Sneutrino Dark Matter in cMSSM/mSUGRA with Inverse Seesaw

We study the possibility of a light Dark Matter (DM) within a constrained Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (cMSSM) framework augmented by a SM singlet-pair sector to account for the non-zero neutrino masses by inverse seesaw mechanism. Working within a 'hybrid' scenario with the MSSM sector fixed at high scale and the singlet neutrino sector at low scale, we find that, contrary to the case of the usual cMSSM where the neutralino DM cannot be very light, we can have a light sneutrino DM with mass below 100 GeV satisfying all the current experimental constraints from cosmology, collider as well as low-energy experiments. We also note that the supersymmetric inverse seesaw mechanism with sneutrino as the lightest supersymmetric partner can have enhanced same-sign dilepton final states with large missing transverse energy (mET) coming from the gluino- and squark-pair as well as the squark-gluino associated productions and their cascade decay through charginos. We present a collider study for the same-sign dilepton+jets+mET signal in this scenario and propose some distinctions with the usual cMSSM. We also comment on the implications of such a light DM scenario on the invisible decay width of an 125 GeV Higgs boson.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 7 tables; matches published versio

Reconciling the 2 TeV Excesses at the LHC in a Linear Seesaw Left-Right Model

We interpret the 2 TeV excesses at the LHC in a left-right symmetric model with Higgs doublets and spontaneous $D$-parity violation. The light neutrino masses are understood via a linear seesaw, suppressed by a high $D$-parity breaking scale, and the heavy neutrinos have a pseudo-Dirac character. In addition, with a suppressed right-handed gauge coupling $g_R / g_L \approx 0.6$ in an $SO(10)$ embedding, we can thereby interpret the observed $eejj$ excess at CMS. We show that it can be reconciled with the diboson and dijet excesses within a simplified scenario based on our model. Moreover, we find that the mixing between the light and heavy neutrinos can be potentially large which would induce dominant non-standard contributions to neutrinoless double beta decay via long-range $\lambda$ and $\eta$ neutrino exchange.Comment: References added, typos fixed, matches published version, 12 pages, 4 figure