Gravitational wave signature and the nature of neutrino masses: Majorana, Dirac, or pseudo-Dirac?

The fermionic nature of neutrinos and the origin of their tiny masses remain unresolved issues in particle physics, intrinsically connected to lepton number symmetry—conserved for Dirac, violated for Majorana, and effectively pseudo-Dirac when global symmetries invoked for conservation are broken by quantum gravity. We investigate whether distinctive gravitational-wave (GW) signatures can illuminate the nature of neutrino masses and their underlying symmetries, particularly in scenarios where Yukawa couplings are not unnaturally small. To this end, we consider the minimal B − L gauge extension of the Standard Model, where quantum numbers of beyond-SM states determine the neutrino nature and the scale of spontaneous B − L breaking governs mass generation. In this framework, we show that neutrinos yield characteristic GW spectra: Majorana neutrinos with high-scale breaking ( ∼ 10 14 GeV) produce local cosmic strings and a flat spectrum across broad frequencies, Dirac neutrinos with low-scale breaking ( ∼ 10 7 GeV) generate peaked spectra from first-order phase transitions, and pseudo-Dirac scenarios give kink-like features from domain wall annihilation.