Equilibration of right-handed electrons
Abstract
We study the equilibration of right-handed electrons in the symmetric phase of the Standard Model. Due to the smallness of the electron Yukawa coupling, it happens relatively late in the history of the Universe. We compute the equilibration rate at leading order in the Standard Model couplings, by including gauge interactions, the top Yukawa- and the Higgs self-interaction. The dominant contribution is due to particle scattering, even though the rate of (inverse) Higgs decays is strongly enhanced by multiple soft scattering which is included by Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) resummation. Our numerical result is substantially larger than approximations presented in previous literature.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1902.07220,
title = {Equilibration of right-handed electrons},
author = {Dietrich Bodeker and Dennis Schroder},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.07220},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
31 pages, 5 figures. v2: Added appendix estimating the conversion of right-handed electron number into hypermagnetic fields through the chiral anomaly. References added, minor errors corrected, results and conclusions unchanged, published version