Baryon Washout, Electroweak Phase Transition, and Perturbation Theory
Abstract
We analyze the conventional perturbative treatment of sphaleron-induced baryon number washout relevant for electroweak baryogenesis and show that it is not gauge-independent due to the failure of consistently implementing the Nielsen identities order-by-order in perturbation theory. We provide a gauge-independent criterion for baryon number preservation in place of the conventional (gauge-dependent) criterion needed for successful electroweak baryogenesis. We also review the arguments leading to the preservation criterion and analyze several sources of theoretical uncertainties in obtaining a numerical bound. In various beyond the standard model scenarios, a realistic perturbative treatment will likely require knowledge of the complete two-loop finite temperature effective potential and the one-loop sphaleron rate.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1101.4665,
title = {Baryon Washout, Electroweak Phase Transition, and Perturbation Theory},
author = {Hiren H. Patel and Michael J. Ramsey-Musolf},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.4665},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
25 pages, 9 figures; v2 minor typos corrected