Schwinger--Keldysh formulation of electromagnetic leptogenesis in an EFT framework
Abstract
We study TeV-scale electromagnetic leptogenesis (EMLG) in an effective field theory (EFT) framework, starting from an ultraviolet (UV)-complete model in which integrating out heavy states generates the gauge-invariant dimension-six dipole operators and . After electroweak symmetry breaking these operators induce effective dipole couplings of the right-handed neutrinos to , , and , enabling decays, inverse decays, and scattering processes in the electroweak crossover window. Gauge invariance enforces a Higgs insertion and thus a parametric suppression of both the CP-odd source and the washout in the non-resonant, hierarchical regime, preventing reproduction of the observed baryon asymmetry. We therefore focus on the quasi-degenerate limit, in which the self-energy contribution to the CP asymmetry is resonantly enhanced and coherent flavor dynamics among the nearly degenerate becomes essential. Using the CTP/Schwinger--Keldysh formalism, we derive density-matrix quantum kinetic equations (QKEs) whose collision term, at leading order in the effective dipole couplings and SM gauge interactions, incorporates processes and the leading scatterings in a unified and non-overcounted manner, without the need for real-intermediate-state (RIS) subtraction. Solving the resulting system numerically, we present a coherent EFT pipeline from UV matching and renormalization-group (RG) running to electroweak-scale effective dipole couplings, resonantly regulated CP sources, and the frozen-out baryon asymmetry. For both thermal and zero initial heavy-neutrino abundances, we find in the oscillation-motivated region that the undiluted freeze-out yield can exceed by several orders of magnitude.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.01652,
title = {Schwinger--Keldysh formulation of electromagnetic leptogenesis in an EFT framework},
author = {Rin Takada},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.01652},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
89 pages, 23 figures