0000000000625229
AUTHOR
Laura Covi
Baryogenesis from mixed particle decays
We consider the $CP$ violating asymmetries produced in the decay of heavy particles, studying the effects of heavy particle mixing for arbitrary mass splittings. A considerable enhancement of the asymmetries is achieved when the masses of the mixed states are comparable, and the enhancement is maximal for mass splittings of the order of the widths of the decaying particles. We apply the results to the particular case of heavy scalar neutrino decays relevant for leptogenesis scenarios.
On the CP asymmetries in Majorana neutrino decays
We study the CP asymmetries in lepton number violating two body scattering processes and show explicitly how they vanish, in agreement with unitarity constraints. We relate these cross section asymmetries to the CP decay rate asymmetries of the intermediate massive neutrinos and show how the inclusion of the Universe expansion via Boltzmann equations is the key ingredient to allow the production of a non-vanishing asymmetry in spite of the unitarity constraint on the cross sections. We then show that the absorptive parts of both the one loop vertex and self energy corrections do contribute to the CP decay asymmetries.
Finite temperature effects on CP violating asymmetries
We compute the CP violating decay asymmetries relevant for baryogenesis scenarios involving the out of equilibrium decays of heavy particles, including the finite temperature effects arising from the background of light thermal particles which are present during the decay epoch. Thermal effects can modify the size of CP violation by a sizeable fraction in the decay of scalar particles, but we find interesting cancellations in the thermal corrections affecting the asymmetries in the decays of fermions, as well as in the decay of scalars in supersymmetric theories. We also estimate the effects which arise from the motion of the decaying particles with respect to the background plasma.