Leptogenesis via Axion Oscillations after Inflation

Alexander Kusenko, Kai Schmitz, and Tsutomu T. Yanagida
Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 011302 – Published 2 July 2015

Abstract

Once a light axionlike scalar field couples to the electroweak gauge bosons, its classical motion during reheating induces an effective chemical potential for the fermion number. In the presence of rapid lepton number (L)-violating processes in the plasma, such a chemical potential provides a favorable opportunity for baryogenesis via leptogenesis. We are able to demonstrate that L violation due to the exchange of heavy Majorana neutrinos is sufficient for a successful realization of this idea. Our mechanism represents a novel and minimal alternative to thermal leptogenesis, which turns out to be insensitive to the masses and CP-violating phases in the heavy neutrino sector. It is consistent with heavy neutrino masses close to the scale of grand unification and, quite complementary to thermal leptogenesis, requires the reheating temperature to be at least of order 1012GeV.

  • Figure
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  • Received 18 December 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.011302

© 2015 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Alexander Kusenko1,2, Kai Schmitz2,*, and Tsutomu T. Yanagida2

  • 1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1547, USA
  • 2Kavli IPMU (WPI), UTIAS, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8583, Japan

  • *Corresponding author. kai.schmitz@ipmu.jp

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Vol. 115, Iss. 1 — 3 July 2015

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