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Dark sectors provide beyond Standard Model scenarios which can address unresolved puzzles, such as the observed dark matter abundance or the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. A naturally small portal to the dark sector is obtained if dark-sector interactions stem from a non-Abelian hidden gauge group that couples through kinetic mixing with the hypercharge boson. In this work, we investigate the phenomenology of such a portal of dimension five in the presence of CP violation, focusing on its signatures in fermion electric dipole moments. We show that, currently unbounded regions of the parameter space from dark photon searches can be indirectly probed with upcoming electron dipole moment experiments for dark boson masses in the range $1-100$ GeV. We also discuss two particular scenarios where a $SU(2)_D$ dark gauge group spontaneously breaks into either an Abelian $U(1)_D$ or nothing. In both cases, we show that potentially observable electron dipole moments can be produced in vast regions of the parameter space compatible with current experimental constraints and observed dark matter abundance., Comment: 18 Pages + Appendices. Comments welcome!

The spontaneous breaking of a $U(1)$ symmetry via an intermediate discrete symmetry may yield a hybrid topological defect of \emph{domain walls bounded by cosmic strings}. The decay of this defect network leads to a unique gravitational wave signal spanning many orders in observable frequencies, that can be distinguished from signals generated by other sources. We investigate the production of gravitational waves from this mechanism in the context of the type-I two-Higgs-doublet model extended by a $U(1)_R$ symmetry, that simultaneously accommodates the seesaw mechanism, anomaly cancellation, and eliminates flavour-changing neutral currents. The gravitational wave spectrum produced by the string-bounded-wall network can be detected for $U(1)_R$ breaking scale from $10^{12}$ to $10^{15}$ GeV in forthcoming interferometers including LISA and Einstein Telescope, with a distinctive $f^{3}$ slope and inflexion in the frequency range between microhertz and hertz., Comment: 19 pages + reference, 4 figures, extended discussion on gravitational waves with unchanged conclusions, matches version published in JHEP

In flavor models the vacuum alignment of flavons is typically achieved via the $F$-terms of certain fields in the supersymmetric limit. We propose a method for preserving such alignments, up to a rescaling of the vacuum expectation values, even after supersymmetry (and the flavor symmetry) are softly broken, facilitating the vacuum alignment in models which are non-supersymmetric at low energies. Examples of models with different flavor groups, namely $A_4$, $T_7$, $S_4$ and $\Delta(27)$, are discussed., Comment: 28 pages + references

We present the possibility that the seesaw mechanism and nonthermal leptogenesis can be probed via primordial non-Gaussianities in the context of a majoron curvaton model. Originating as a massless Nambu-Goldstone boson from the spontaneous breaking of the global baryon ($B$) minus lepton ($L$) number symmetry at a scale $v_{B-L}$, majoron becomes massive when it couples to a new confining sector through anomaly. Acting as a curvaton, majoron produces the observed red-tilted curvature power spectrum without relying on any inflaton contribution, and its decay in the post-inflationary era gives rise to a nonthermal population of right-handed neutrinos that participate in leptogenesis. A distinctive feature of the mechanism is the generation of observable non-Gaussianity, nontrivially linked to the scale of seesaw and leptogenesis. Identifying the viable parameter space, we show that the non-Gaussianity parameter $f_{\rm NL} \gtrsim \mathcal{O} (0.1)$ is produced for high-scale seesaw ($v_{B-L}$ at $\mathcal{O}(10^{14-17})$ GeV) and leptogenesis ($M_1 \gtrsim \mathcal{O}(10^6)$ GeV) where the latter represents the lightest right-handed neutrino mass. While the current bounds on local non-Gaussianity excludes some part of parameter space, the rest can be fully probed by future experiments like CMB-S4, LSST, and 21 cm tomography., Comment: 19 pages + references, 7 figures

In the light of the evidence of a gravitational wave background from the NANOGrav 15yr data set, we reconsider the split majoron model as a new physics extension of the standard model able to generate a needed contribution to solve the current tension between the data and the standard interpretation in terms of inspiraling supermassive black hole massive binaries. In the split majoron model the seesaw right-handed neutrinos acquire Majorana masses from spontaneous symmetry breaking of global $U(1)_{B-L}$ in a strong first order phase transition of a complex scalar field occurring above the electroweak scale. The final vacuum expectation value couples to a second complex scalar field undergoing a low scale phase transition occurring after neutrino decoupling. Such a coupling enhances the strength of this second low scale first order phase transition and can generate a sizeable primordial gravitational wave background contributing to the NANOGrav 15yr signal. Some amount of extra-radiation is generated after neutron-to-proton ration freeze-out but prior to nucleosynthesis. This can be either made compatible with current upper bound from primordial deuterium measurements or even be used to solve a potential deuterium problem. Moreover, the free streaming length of light neutrinos can be suppressed by their interactions with the resulting majoron background and this mildly ameliorates existing cosmological tensions. Thus cosmological observations nicely provide independent motivations for the model., Comment: 22 pages + references, 3 figures; v3 matching version to be published in PRD

Several pulsar timing arrays including NANOGrav, EPTA, PPTA, and CPTA have recently reported the observation of a stochastic background of gravitational wave spectrum in the nano-Hz frequencies. An inflationary interpretation of this observation is challenging from various aspects. We report that such a signal can arise from the Chern-Simons coupling in axion inflation, where a pseudoscalar inflaton couples to a (massive) $U(1)$ gauge field, leading to efficient production of a transverse gauge mode. Such tachyonic particle production during inflation exponentially enhances the primordial perturbations and leads to a unique parity-violating gravitational wave spectrum, that remains flat near the CMB scales but becomes blue-tilted at smaller scales. We identify the parameter space consistent with various cosmological constraints and show that the resultant gravitational wave signals can provide extra contribution on top of the standard astrophysical contribution from inspiraling supermassive black hole binaries towards explaining the observed excess at NANOGrav. The parity-violating nature of the signal can be probed in future interferometers, distinguishing it from most other new physics signals attempting to explain the NANOGrav result., Comment: 11 pages + references, 6 figures, minor changes to match published version

We propose a new method towards distinguishing the Dirac versus Majorana nature of neutrino masses from the spectrum of gravitational waves (GWs) associated with neutrino mass genesis. Motivated by the principle of generating small neutrino masses without tiny Yukawa couplings, we assume generic seesaw mechanisms for both Majorana and Dirac neutrino masses. For Majorana neutrinos, we further assume a spontaneously broken gauged $U(1)_{B-L}$ symmetry, independently of the type of Majorana seesaw mechanism, which gives a cosmic string induced GW signal flat over a wide range of frequencies. For Dirac neutrinos, we assume the spontaneous breaking of a $Z_2$ symmetry, the minimal symmetry choice associated with all Dirac seesaw mechanisms, which is softly broken, generating a peaked GW spectrum from the annihilation of the resulting domain walls. In fact, the GW spectra for all types of Dirac seesaws with such a broken $Z_2$ symmetry are identical, subject to a mild caveat. As an illustrative example, we study the simplest respective type-I seesaw mechanisms, and show that the striking difference in the shapes of the GW spectra can help differentiate between these Dirac and Majorana seesaws, complementing results of neutrinoless double beta decay experiments. We also discuss detailed implications of the recent NANOGrav data for Majorana and Dirac seesaw models., Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Version to appear in PRD

We explore the origin of Majorana masses within the majoron model and how this can lead to the generation of a distinguishable primordial stochastic background of gravitational waves. We first show how in the simplest majoron model only a contribution from cosmic string can be within the reach of planned experiments. We then consider extensions containing multiple complex scalars, demonstrating how in this case a spectrum comprising contributions from both a strong first order phase transition and cosmic strings can naturally emerge. We show that the interplay between multiple scalar fields can amplify the phase transition signal, potentially leading to double peaks over the wideband sloped spectrum from cosmic strings. We also underscore the possibility of observing such a gravitational wave background to provide insights into the reheating temperature of the universe. We conclude highlighting how the model can be naturally combined with scenarios addressing the origin of matter of the universe, where baryogenesis occurs via leptogenesis and a right-handed neutrino plays the role of dark matter., Comment: 26 pages + references, 6 figures, minor clarifications with unchanged results, matches version accepted to JHEP

We extend the reach of the ``cosmological collider'' for massive gauge boson production during inflation from the CMB scales to the interferometer scales. Considering a Chern-Simons coupling between the gauge bosons and the pseudoscalar inflaton, one of the transverse gauge modes is efficiently produced and its inverse decay leaves an imprint in the primordial scalar and tensor perturbations. We study the correlation functions of these perturbations and derive the updated constraints on the parameter space from CMB observables. We then extrapolate the tensor power spectrum to smaller scales consistently taking into account the impact of the gauge field on inflationary dynamics. Our results show that the presence of massive gauge fields during inflation can be detected from characteristic gravitational wave signals encompassing the whole range of current and planned interferometers., Comment: 35 pages, 7 figures, references added, minor modification in gravitational wave sensitivity plots

The four-point correlation function of primordial scalar perturbations has parity-even and parity-odd contributions and the parity-odd signal in cosmological observations is opening a novel window to look for new physics in the inflationary epoch. We study the distinct parity-odd and even prediction from the axion inflation model, in which the inflaton couples to a vector field via a Chern-Simons interaction, and the vector field is considered to be either approximately massless ($m_A \ll $ Hubble scale $H$) or very massive ($m_A \sim H $). The parity-odd signal arises due to one transverse mode of the vector field being predominantly produced during inflation. We adopt the in-in formalism to evaluate the correlation functions. Considering the vector field mode function to be dominated by its real part up to a constant phase, we simplify the formulas for numerical computations. The numerical studies show that the massive and massless vector fields give significant parity-even signals, while the parity-odd contribution is about one to two orders of magnitude smaller., Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures; minor changes, references added

Gravitational production of massive particles due to cosmic expansion can be significant during the inflationary and reheating period of the Universe. If the particle also has non-gravitational interactions that do not significantly affect its production, numerous observational probes open up, including cosmological probes. In this work, we focus on the gravitational production of light vector bosons that couple feebly to the Standard Model (SM) particles. Due to the very feeble coupling, the light vector bosons never reach thermal equilibrium, and if the Hubble scale at the end of inflation is above $10^8$ GeV, the gravitational production can overwhelm the thermal production via the freeze-in mechanism by many orders of magnitude. As a result, much stronger constraints from the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) can be placed on the lifetime and mass of the vector bosons compared to the scenario where only thermal production is considered. As an example, we study the sub-GeV scale dark photons, which couple to the SM only through kinetic mixing, and derive constraints on the mass and kinetic mixing parameter of the dark photon from the photodisintegration effects on the light element abundances relevant at the end of the BBN when the cosmic age was around $10^4$ s., Comment: 26 pages + references, 8 figures, minor changes from previous version, matches published version in JHEP

We present here two concrete examples of models where a sub-TeV scale breaking of their respective $\mathcal{T}_{13}$ and $A_5$ flavor symmetries is able to account for the recently observed discrepancy in the muon anomalous magnetic moment, $(g-2)_\mu$. Similarities in the flavor structures of the charged-lepton Yukawa matrix and dipole matrix yielding $(g-2)_\mu$ give rise to strong constraints on low-scale flavor models when bounds from lepton flavor violation (LFV) are imposed. These constraints place stringent limits on the off-diagonal Yukawa structure, suggesting a mostly (quasi-)diagonal texture for models with a low flavor breaking scale $\Lambda_f$. We argue that many of the popular flavor models in the literature designed to explain the fermion masses and mixings are not suitable for reproducing the observed discrepancy in $(g-2)_\mu$, which requires a delicate balance of maintaining a low flavor scale while simultaneously satisfying strong LFV constraints., Comment: 22+12 pages, 5 figures, minor changes to match published version