The LHCb collaboration has recently reported on some anomalies in b → s transitions. In addition to discrepancies with the Standard Model (SM) predictions in some angular observables and branching ratios, an intriguing hint for lepton universality violation was found. Here we propose a simple model that extends the SM with a dark sector charged under an additional U(1) gauge symmetry. The spontaneous breaking of this symmetry gives rise to a massive Z boson, which communicates the SM particles with a valid dark matter candidate, while solving the b → s anomalies with contributions to the relevant observables.

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) will be a world-class neutrino observatory and nucleon decay detector designed to answer fundamental questions about the nature of elementary particles and their role in the universe.

Type-II seesaw is a simple scenario in which Majorana neutrino masses are generated by the exchange of a heavy scalar electroweak triplet. When endowed with additional heavy fields, such as right-handed neutrinos or extra triplets, it also provides a compelling framework for baryogenesis via leptogenesis. We derive in this context the full network of Boltzmann equations for studying leptogenesis in the flavored regime. To this end we determine the relations which hold among the chemical potentials of the various particle species in the thermal bath. This takes into account the standard model Yukawa interactions of both leptons and quarks as well as sphaleron processes which, depending on the temperature, may be classified as faster or slower than the Universe Hubble expansion. We find that when leptogenesis is enabled by the presence of an extra triplet, lepton flavor effects allow the production of the B −L asymmetry through lepton number conserving CP asymmetries. This scenario becomes dominant as soon as the triplets couple more to leptons than to standard model scalar doublets. In this case, the way the B − L asymmetry is created through flavor effects is novel: instead of invoking the effect of L-violating inverse decays faster than the Hubble rate, it involves the effect of L-violating decays slower than the Hubble rate. We also analyze the more general situation where lepton number violating CP asymmetries are present and actively participate in the generation of the B − L asymmetry, pointing out that as long as L-violating triplet decays are still in thermal equilibrium when the triplet gauge scattering processes decouple, flavor effects can be striking, allowing to avoid all washout suppression effects from seesaw interactions. In this case the amount of B − L asymmetry produced is limited only by a universal gauge suppression effect, which nevertheless goes away for large triplet decay rates.

We systematically analyze the d = 5 Weinberg operator at 2-loop order. Using a diagrammatic approach, we identify two different interesting categories of neutrino mass models: (i) Genuine 2-loop models for which both, tree-level and 1-loop contributions, are guaranteed to be absent. And (ii) finite 2-loop diagrams, which correspond to the 1-loop generation of some particular vertex appearing in a given 1-loop neutrino mass model, thus being effectively 2-loop. From the large list of all possible 2-loop diagrams, the vast majority are infinite corrections to lower order neutrino mass models and only a moderately small number of diagrams fall into these two interesting classes. Moreover, all diagrams in class (i) are just variations of three basic diagrams, with examples discussed in the literature before. Similarly, we also show that class (ii) diagrams consists of only variations of these three plus two more basic diagrams. Finally, we show how our results can be consistently and readily used in order to construct two-loop neutrino mass models.

The smallness of the observed neutrino masses might have a radiative origin. Here we revisit a specific two-loop model of neutrino mass, independently proposed by Babu and Zee. We point out that current constraints from neutrino data can be used to derive strict lower limits on the branching ratio of flavour changing charged lepton decays, such as µ → eγ. Non-observation of Br(µ → eγ) at the level of 10 −13 would rule out singly charged scalar masses smaller than 590 GeV (5.04 TeV) in case of normal (inverse) neutrino mass hierarchy. Conversely, decay branching ratios of the non-standard scalars of the model can be fixed by the measured neutrino angles (and mass scale). Thus, if the scalars of the model are light enough to be produced at the LHC or ILC, measuring their decay properties would serve as a direct test of the model as the origin of neutrino masses.