Superheavy dark matter within the seesaw framework

Abstract: Superheavy right-handed neutrinos are known to provide an economical solution to generate the mass of the light neutrinos as well as a lepton asymmetry through to their decay in the early Universe that gets subsequently converted into a baryon asymmetry. Another missing piece of the Standard Model is dark matter, which can also be superheavy provided that the particle lifetime is anomalously long, i.e. greater than $\simeq 10^{22}~$yr. Relying on two variants of the seesaw framework, and assuming slight mixing in the right-handed neutrino sector, we show that the resulting Majorana mass eigenstates with mass $M_X$ can be dark matter candidates provided that the mass mixing parameter $\delta M$ satisfies approximately $\delta M\lesssim 2\times 10^{-17}/[M_X/(10^9~\mathrm{GeV})]^{0.5}$~GeV for $M_X\gtrsim 10^9$~GeV. Some implications in the context of inflationary cosmologies are discussed.