Postinflationary Higgs relaxation and the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry.
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.
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1547, USA and Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI), University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8568, Japan.
Alexander
A
Kusenko
William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, School of Physics and Astronomy,University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.
Lauren
L
Pearce
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1547, USA.
Louis
L
Yang