Equilibration of the chiral asymmetry due to finite electron mass in electron-positron plasma

Abstract

We calculate the rate of collisional decay of the axial charge in an ultrarelativistic electron-positron plasma, also known as the chirality flipping rate. We find that contrary to the existing estimates, the chirality flipping rate appears already in the first order in the fine-structure constant $\alpha$ and is therefore orders of magnitude greater than previously believed. The main channels for the rapid relaxation of the axial charge are the collinear emission of a weakly damped photon and the Compton scattering. The latter contributes to the $\mathcal{O}(\alpha )$ result because of the infrared divergence in its cross section, which is regularized on the soft scale $\sim eT$ due to the thermal corrections. Our results are important for the description of the early Universe processes (such as leptogenesis or magnetogenesis) that affect differently left- and right-chiral fermions of the Standard Model, as discussed in more details in the companion Letter.

43 pages, 20 figures

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Chiral effects in astrophysics and cosmology
• Strong-Field Physics in QED and QCD: From Fundamentals to Applications
• Chiral hydrodynamics in strong external magnetic fields
• Relic gravitational waves from the chiral magnetic effect
• Evolution of the Primordial Axial Charge across Cosmic Times
• Helical magnetic effect and the chiral anomaly
• Chiral kinetic theory with small mass corrections and quantum coherent states
• Chiral anomalous processes in magnetospheres of pulsars and black holes
• Freeze-in and freeze-out generation of lepton asymmetries after baryogenesis in the $\nu$MSM
• Anomalous plasma: chiral magnetic effect and all that
• Gravitational waves generation in turbulent hypermagnetic fields before the electroweak phase transition
• Impact of hypermagnetic fields on relic gravitational waves, neutrino oscillations and baryon asymmetry
• Chiral asteroseismology: seismic oscillations caused by chiral transport in neutron stars and supernovae
• Chiral effects and Joule heating in hot and dense matter
• Scattering versus Forbidden Decay in Dark Matter Freeze-in