The Flavor of Cosmology

Understand

We discuss the cosmology of models in which the standard model Yukawa couplings depend on scalar field(s), often referred to as flavons.

• We find that thermal corrections of the flavon potential tend to decrease the Yukawa couplings, providing an important input to model-building.
• Working in the specific framework of Froggatt-Nielsen models, we compute the abundance of flavons in the early universe generated both via freeze-in and from coherent oscillations induced by thermal corrections to their potential, and discuss constraints on flavon models from cosmology.
• We find that cosmology places important constraints on theories containing flavons even for regions of parameter space inaccessible to collider searches.