Seesaw Cosmology

Abstract

We study perturbative reheating in which the inflaton transfers its energy to the Standard Model through right-handed neutrinos (RHNs) responsible for light-neutrino masses via the type-I seesaw mechanism. We refer to the resulting nonstandard thermal history as $seesaw$ $cosmology$. When produced relativistically and sufficiently long lived, the RHNs generate a characteristic sequence of inflaton, relativistic-RHN, nonrelativistic-RHN, and Standard Model radiation domination. We solve the Boltzmann system while retaining the production-time dependence of the nonthermal RHN distribution and its relativistic-to-nonrelativistic transition. The Standard Model temperature rapidly approaches a plateau during inflaton domination and subsequently scales as $a^{-1/4}$ and $a^{-3/8}$ during relativistic- and nonrelativistic-RHN domination, respectively. We investigate the implications of seesaw cosmology for dark-matter production. Direct production through inflaton decays can be enhanced relative to conventional reheating by a factor of order $m_\phi/(2m_N)$, while ultraviolet freeze-in exhibits the critical temperature powers $p = 12$ and $20$, leading to potentially large contributions before the final radiation-dominated era. Seesaw cosmology therefore connects neutrino-mass generation, the pre-BBN thermal history and phenomena such as dark-matter production and baryogenesis.