Kubo relations and radiative corrections for lepton number washout

Abstract

The rates for lepton number washout in extensions of the Standard Model containing right-handed neutrinos are key ingredients in scenarios for baryogenesis through leptogenesis. We relate these rates to real-time correlation functions at finite temperature, without making use of any particle approximations. The relations are valid to quadratic order in neutrino Yukawa couplings and to all orders in Standard Model couplings. They take into account all spectator processes, and apply both in the symmetric and in the Higgs phase of the electroweak theory. We use the relations to compute washout rates at next-to-leading order in g, where g denotes a Standard Model gauge or Yukawa coupling, both in the non-relativistic and in the relativistic regime. Even in the non-relativistic regime the parametrically dominant radiative corrections are only suppressed by a single power of g. In the non-relativistic regime radiative corrections increase the washout rate by a few percent at high temperatures, but they are of order unity around the weak scale and in the relativistic regime.

27 pages, 3 figures. v2: some clarifications and corrections, references added

References in corpus (3)

• Leptogenesis
• Thermal production of relativistic Majorana neutrinos: Strong enhancement by multiple soft scattering
• Heavy quark chemical equilibration rate as a transport coefficient

Cited by in corpus (12)

• The Present and Future Status of Heavy Neutral Leptons
• Probing leptogenesis with GeV-scale sterile neutrinos at LHCb and BELLE II
• Right-handed neutrino production rate at T > 160 GeV
• Strong Washout Approximation to Resonant Leptogenesis
• Spectator Effects during Leptogenesis in the Strong Washout Regime
• Order g^2 susceptibilities in the symmetric phase of the Standard Model
• Kinetic equations for sterile neutrinos from thermal fluctuations
• A thermal neutrino interaction rate at NLO
• Complete leading-order standard model corrections to quantum leptogenesis
• Conformal Leptogenesis in Composite Higgs Models
• Sterile neutrino rates for general $M$, $T$, $\mu$, $k$: review of a theoretical framework
• Energy and momentum dependence of the soft-axion interaction rate