The Affleck-Dine Curvaton
Abstract
The Standard Model of particle physics does not explain the origin of the universe's baryon asymmetry or its primordial fluctuations. The Affleck-Dine mechanism is a well-motivated scenario for generating the baryon asymmetry through the post-inflationary dynamics of a complex scalar field with baryon number. The curvaton mechanism is a popular approach for producing curvature perturbations through the dynamics of a light spectator field which decays after inflation. We demonstrate that the same complex field can viably perform both roles without any modifications to the minimal realization of Affleck-Dine baryogenesis. This scenario can also accommodate appreciable levels of primordial non-Gaussianity, beyond those achievable with only a real-valued curvaton field, and may be observable with future CMB experiments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2410.13712,
title = {The Affleck-Dine Curvaton},
author = {Aurora Ireland and Gordan Krnjaic and Takuya Okawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.13712},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
7 pages, 2 figures; v2 added appendix on baryon isocurvature