Majorons as cold light dark matter

Abstract: Majorons are the Goldstone bosons of spontaneously broken lepton number and hence intimately connected to Majorana neutrino masses. Since all majoron couplings are heavily suppressed by the seesaw scale they are interesting candidates for long-lived dark matter. The signature decay into two mono-energetic neutrinos is potentially detectable with neutrino detectors for majoron masses above MeV and complementary to the loop-induced decays into visible particles. The mass range between keV and MeV can only be probed indirectly with the majoron decay into two photons; keV-scale majorons can be warm or cold dark matter depending on the underlying freeze-in mechanism.