Production of Massive Fermions at Preheating and Leptogenesis

Abstract

We present a complete computation of the inflaton decay into very massive fermions during preheating. We show that heavy fermions are produced very efficiently up to masses of order 10^{17}-10^{18} GeV; the accessible mass range is thus even broader than the one for heavy bosons. We apply our findings to the leptogenesis scenario, proposing a new version of it, in which the massive right-handed neutrinos, responsible for the generation of the baryon asymmetry, are produced during preheating. We also discuss other production mechanisms of right-handed neutrinos in the early Universe, identifying the neutrino mass parameters for which the observed baryon asymmetry is reproduced.

29 pages, 4 figures