Connections between the Seesaw and Dark Matter Searches

Understand

In some dark matter models, the coupling of the dark matter particle to the standard model Higgs determines the dark matter relic density while it is also consistent with dark matter direct detection experiments.

• On the other hand, the seesaw for generating the neutrino masses probably arises from a spontaneous symmetry breaking of global lepton number.
• The dark matter particle thus can significantly annihilate into massless Majorons when the lepton number breaking scale and hence the seesaw scale is near the electroweak scale.
• This leads to an interesting interplay between neutrino physics and dark matter physics and the annihilation mode has an interesting implication on dark matter searches.