Charged-Particle Decay at Finite Temperature

Abstract

Radiative corrections to the decay rate of charged fermions caused by the presence of a thermal bath of photons are calculated in the limit when temperatures are below the masses of all charged particles involved. The cancellation of finite-temperature infrared divergences in the decay rate is described in detail. Temperature-dependent radiative corrections to a two-body decay of a hypothetical charged fermion and to electroweak decays of a muon are given. We touch upon possible implications of these results for charged particles in the early Universe.

18 pages, 6 figures. v2: typos corrected, bibliography revised, content matches published version

References in corpus (16)

• Big Bang Nucleosynthesis with Long Lived Charged Massive Particles
• Big Bang Nucleosynthesis with Bound States of Long-lived Charged Particles
• The cosmic 6Li and 7Li problems and BBN with long-lived charged massive particles
• Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis with Long-Lived Charged Slepton
• A Simultaneous Solution to the ^6Li and ^7Li Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Problems from a Long-Lived Negatively-Charged Leptonic Particle
• Light Gravitinos at Colliders and Implications for Cosmology
• Direct Detection of Supersymmetric Particles in Neutrino Telescopes
• Long-Lived Staus at Neutrino Telescopes
• Probing new physics with long-lived charged particles produced by atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos
• Long-lived Staus from Cosmic Rays
• Big-bang nucleosynthesis with a long-lived charged massive particle including ${}^4$He spallation processes
• Extremely Long-Lived Charged Massive Particles as A Probe for Reheating of the Universe
• Open problems in hot QCD
• Direct Detection of Kaluza-Klein Particles in Neutrino Telescopes
• Finite Temperature Corrections to Relic Density Calculations
• Cosmogenic neutrinos and quasi-stable supersymmetric particle production

Cited by in corpus (9)

• micrOMEGAs 6.0: N-component dark matter
• Baryonecrosis: Displaced Vertices from $R$-Parity Violation
• Thermal Field Theory in real-time formalism: concepts and applications for particle decays
• Thermal width of the Higgs boson in hot QCD matter
• Relativistic corrections to the thermal interaction of bound particles
• Finite-temperature modification of heavy particle decay and dark matter annihilation
• Cosmological Particle Decays at Finite Temperature
• Axion Portal to Scalar Dark Matter: Unveiling Stabilizing Symmetry Footprints
• Theory Vision talk at LHCP2018