Theory HEP Seminar

Rethinking the origin of neutrino masses: the role of gravity<

Lena Funcke

MIT

The most popular directions of model building beyond the Standard Model focus on new phenomena at the high-energy scales of the early Universe. As an alternative direction, we have developed late-Universe solutions to the neutrino mass and strong CP problems at a new low-energy gravitational scale, which is numerically coincident with the scale of dark energy. In my talk, I will mainly focus on the neutrino mass model and discuss some of its cosmological and astrophysical implications. In particular, I will explain the weakening of the cosmological neutrino mass bounds, the formation of soft topological defects, and the distinction between Majorana and Dirac neutrinos through astrophysical neutrino decays. This talk is based on arxiv:1602.03191, arxiv:1608.08969, arxiv:1811.01991, arxiv:1905.01264, arxiv:2102.13618, and arxiv:2112.02107.