Making the Universe at 20 MeV

Abstract

We present a testable mechanism of low-scale baryogenesis and dark matter production in which neither baryon nor lepton number are violated. Charged $D$ mesons are produced out-of-equilibrium at tens of MeV temperatures. The $D$ mesons quickly undergo CP-violating decays to charged pions, which then decay into dark-sector leptons without violating lepton number. To transfer this lepton asymmetry to the baryon asymmetry, the dark leptons scatter on additional dark-sector states charged under lepton and baryon number. Amusingly, this transfer proceeds without electroweak sphalerons, which are no longer active at such low scales. We present two example models which can achieve this transfer while remaining consistent with current limits. The required amount of CP violation in charged $D$ meson decays, while currently allowed, will be probed by colliders. Additionally, the relevant decays of charged pions to dark-sector leptons have been constrained by the PIENU and PSI experiments and will be further explored in upcoming experiments.

arXiv comment10+5 pages, 3 figures; v2: corrected PIENU bound (no change to results); v3: published in PRD with minor revisions (no change to results)

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• Probing Leptogenesis with the Cosmological Collider
• Freezing-in hadrophilic dark matter at low reheating temperatures
• Collider Signals of Baryogenesis and Dark Matter from $B$ Mesons: A Roadmap to Discovery
• Charged $B$ Mesogenesis
• Cosmological and astrophysical probes of dark baryons
• Asymmetric Dark Matter May Not Be Light
• Detecting Dark Matter Substructures on Small Scales with Fast Radio Bursts
• High Energy Sphalerons for Baryogenesis at Low Temperatures
• Branching Fractions of $B$ Meson Decays in Mesogenesis
• Prospects on searches for baryonic Dark Matter produced in $b$-hadron decays at LHCb
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• Invisible and Semi-invisible Decays of Bottom Baryons
• The Strange Physics of Dark Baryons