Quantum leptogenesis I

By A. Anisimov, W. Buchmuller, M. Drewes, S. Mendizabal. 2010

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Thermal leptogenesis explains the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe in terms of neutrino masses, consistent with neutrino oscillation experiments. We present a full quantum mechanical calculation of the generated lepton asymmetry based on Kadanoff-Baym equations. Origin of the asymmetry is the departure from equilibrium of the statistical propagator of the heavy Majorana neutrino, together with CP violating couplings. The lepton asymmetry is calculated directly in terms of Green's functions without referring to "number densities". Compared to Boltzmann and quantum Boltzmann equations, the crucial difference are memory effects, rapid oscillations much faster than the heavy neutrino equilibration time. These oscillations strongly suppress the generated lepton asymmetry, unless the standard model gauge interactions, which cause thermal damping, are properly taken into account. We find that these damping effects essentially compensate the enhancement due to quantum statistical factors, so that finally the conventional Boltzmann equations again provide rather accurate predictions for the lepton asymmetry. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74917c747484774f5abfb3f5376eb079a45d990c

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Citations in the corpus

Thermal production of ultrarelativistic right-handed neutrinos: complete leading-order results (2012, unknown): “(5)Among other contributions, they include a resummation of a finite width of the Standard Model particles, the role of which was recently emphasized in [17].”
Dark Matter, Baryogenesis and Neutrino Oscillations from Right Handed Neutrinos (2012, background): “In the past years, much progress has been made in the derivation of effective kinetic equations from first principles [75–78, 125, 126, 130, 133, 144–168].”
The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos (2013, methodology): “The conclusion on this point is that it is possible to describe leptogenesis in the unflavoured [449, 452], flavoured [430, 451] and resonant [411, 412] regimes by effective kinetic equations.”
Leptogenesis in the Universe (2012, background): “An interesting question which has attracted some attention recently [133, 85, 134, 135, 136, 127, 137, 94, 138, 121, 139] is under which circumstances the classical BE can be safely applied to get reliable results and, conversely, when a more rigorous quantum approach is needed.”
Baryogenesis from the weak scale to the grand unification scale (2020, methodology): “The lepton asymmetry is then obtained from the two-loop diagram (Anisimov et al., 2011) in the left panel of Fig.”