We present a unified theory of inflation, neutrino mass, baryogenesis, and dark matter where global lepton number symmetry and its breaking play a crucial role. The basic idea is to use a lepton number carrying a complex scalar field as the inflaton as well as the field that implements Affleck-Dine (AD) leptogenesis. Dark matter is the massive Majoron which is a pseudo-Goldstone boson, resulting from the spontaneous breaking of lepton number symmetry supplemented by explicit lepton number violation needed to implement AD leptogenesis. The magnitude of the resulting nB/s in the model is related to the mass of the pseudo-Goldstone dark matter, connecting two apparently disconnected cosmological observations. An inverse seesaw mechanism with lepton number breaking at low scale is crucial to prevent washout of the lepton asymmetry during the universe’s evolution. The model seems to provide an economical solution to several puzzles of the standard model of particle physics and cosmology in one stroke.

• Received 10 December 2021
• Accepted 7 February 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.035024

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society