Production of Massless Fermions during Inflation

Abstract

We compute the one loop self energy, in a locally de Sitter background, for a massless fermion which is Yukawa-coupled to a massless, minimally coupled scalar. We then solve the modified Dirac equation resulting from inclusion of the self energy. We find faster-than-exponential growth in the fermion wave function, consistent with the production of fermions through a process in which a scalar and a fermion-anti-fermion pair are ripped out of the vacuum by inflation.

17 pages, LaTeX 2e, 1 figure. The first 15 pages gives the text of version 1, which matches the published version. The erratum appended on page 15 corrects a crucial sign error which COMPLETELY CHANGES THE PHYSICAL CONCLUSIONS