24–27 Sept 2019
DESY Hamburg
Europe/Berlin timezone

Relativistic and spectator effects in leptogenesis with heavy sterile neutrinos

25 Sept 2019, 15:10
10m
Seminar rooms 4a /4b (DESY Hamburg)

Seminar rooms 4a /4b

DESY Hamburg

Cosmology & Astroparticle Physics Parallel Session: Cosmology & Astroparticle Physics

Speaker

Mr Philipp Klose (Université Catholique de Louvain)

Description

For leptogenesis with heavy sterile neutrinos above the Casus-Ibarra bound, asymmetries produced by relativistic sterile neutrinos at early times can be relevant in the case of weak washout or if the asymmetry is partly protected from washout by being transferred to partially equilibrated spectator fields. We thus study the relevance of relativistic effects for leptogenesis in a minimal seesaw model with two strongly hierarchical sterile neutrinos. Starting from first principles, we derive a set of relativistic momentum averaged boltzman equations to compute the final B-L asymmetry at order one accuracy for various initial conditions. Assuming fully equilibrated spectator fields, we find that relativistic corrections lead to a sign flip and an enhancement of the final asymmetry for weak washouts and a vanishing initial abundance of sterile neutrinos. As an example for the effect of partially equilibrated spectators, we consider b-Yukawa and weak sphaleron interactions for sterile neutrinos with masses 5 * 10^12 GeV. For strong washouts and a vanishing initial abundance of sterile neutrinos, this can give another sign flip and an absolute enhancement of the final asymmetry by up to two orders of magnitude relative to the cases with either negligible or fully equilibrated spectator interactions.

Primary author

Mr Philipp Klose (Université Catholique de Louvain)

Co-authors

Prof. Björn Garbrecht (Technische Universität München) Dr Carlos Tamarit (Technische Universität München)

Presentation materials