Postinflationary Higgs relaxation and the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry

Abstract

The recent measurement of the Higgs boson mass implies a relatively slow rise of the Standard Model Higgs potential at large scales, and a possible second minimum at even larger scales. Consequently, the Higgs field may develop a large vacuum expectation value during inflation. The relaxation of the Higgs field from its large postinflationary value to the minimum of the effective potential represents an important stage in the evolution of the universe. During this epoch, the time-dependent Higgs condensate can create an effective chemical potential for the lepton number, leading to a generation of the lepton asymmetry in the presence of some large right-handed Majorana neutrino masses. The electroweak sphalerons redistribute this asymmetry between leptons and baryons. This Higgs relaxation leptogenesis can explain the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe even if the Standard Model is valid up to the scale of inflation, and any new physics is suppressed by that high scale.

5 pages, 2 figures; accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett

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• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC
• Reheating constraints to inflationary models
• Affleck-Dine Baryogenesis and Dark Matter Production after High-scale Inflation
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• Leptogenesis via Axion Oscillations after Inflation
• Parametric Resonance in the Early Universe - A Fitting Analysis
• Fluctuation-dissipation dynamics of cosmological scalar fields
• Spontaneous Baryogenesis without Baryon Isocurvature