Implications of a 17 keV neutrino for baryogenesis

There is some experimental evidence for a 17 keV component of the electron neutrino, in the form of the recent observations of kinks in the beta-decay spectra of tritium, ¹⁴C, ³⁵S and ⁶³Ni. In this paper I show that most particle-physics models consistent with the 17 keV neutrino require a baryogenesis scale below 10⁶ GeV. Furthermore, models with a 17 keV neutrino typically contain new sources of CP violation, and the cosmological baryon asymmetry could be generated by anomalous electroweak interactions during a first-order weak phase transition.