Spontaneous B-L Breaking as the Origin of the Hot Early Universe

Wilfried Buchmüller, Valerie Domcke, Kai Schmitz

(Submitted on 29 Feb 2012 (v1), last revised 16 Mar 2012 (this version, v2))

The decay of a false vacuum of unbroken B-L symmetry is an intriguing and testable mechanism to generate the initial conditions of the hot early universe. If B-L is broken at the grand unification scale, the false vacuum phase yields hybrid inflation, ending in tachyonic preheating. The dynamics of the B-L breaking Higgs field and thermal processes produce an abundance of heavy neutrinos whose decays generate entropy, baryon asymmetry and gravitino dark matter. We study the phase transition for the full supersymmetric Abelian Higgs model. For the subsequent reheating process we give a detailed time-resolved description of all particle abundances. The competition of cosmic expansion and entropy production leads to an intermediate period of constant 'reheating' temperature, during which baryon asymmetry and dark matter are produced. Consistency of hybrid inflation, leptogenesis and gravitino dark matter implies relations between neutrino parameters and superparticle masses. In particular, for a gluino mass of 1 TeV, we find a lower bound on the gravitino mass of 10 GeV.

Comments:	64 pages, 8 figures, 1 table. v2: minor numerical corrections, slightly different parameter point chosen in section 4, final results unchanged
Subjects:	High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph); Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO); High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)
Journal reference:	Nucl.Phys.B862 (2012) 587-632
DOI:	10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2012.05.001
Report number:	DESY 11-174
Cite as:	arXiv:1202.6679v2 [hep-ph]

Submission history

From: Valerie Fiona Domcke [view email]
[v1] Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:47:24 GMT (1221kb,D)
[v2] Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:56:05 GMT (1405kb,D)

 

Source: arXiv