Production of Massless Fermions during Inflation
Astrophysics
2009-11-10 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0309593,
title = {Production of Massless Fermions during Inflation},
author = {T. Prokopec and R. P. Woodard},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0309593},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
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