What a Direct Neutrino Mass Measurement Might Teach Us about the Dark Sector

Searches for dark matter suggest that it couples to ordinary matter only very weakly and possibly only through the Higgs or other scalar bosons. On the other hand, neutrinos might not couple to the Higgs boson directly, but only through a loop of dark matter particles, which would naturally explain the small neutrino masses. We demonstrate that current experimental constraints on such a scotogenic scenario allow to make the linear dependence of the lightest neutrino mass on the dark sector-Higgs coupling explicit, so that a measurement by the KATRIN experiment would directly determine its value.

Automated summary

By studying the possible coupling between dark matter and ordinary matter, we have found that current experimental constraints on this "scotogenic scenario" can directly determine the relationship between the lightest neutrino mass and the coupling of the dark matter sector with the Higgs boson.