2026/04/30 by Anonymous, Sayak Guin, Sayantan Sharma
Physics and Astronomy · #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #astro-ph.CO #hep-lat #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/6t1x-trw7
published as Phys.Rev.D 114 (2026) 1, 014520 · v3: published version
openalex publication_date 2026/07/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29 · arxiv created 2026/08/01 · arxiv updated 2026/08/04
We report our new lattice results for the sphaleron rate calculated within a thermal effective field theory of soft SU(N) gluons whose momenta are below the magnetic scale, where <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <a:mi>N</a:mi> <a:mo>=</a:mo> <a:mn>2</a:mn> </a:math> , 3, for a wide range of temperatures spanning from 0.6 to <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <c:msup> <c:mn>10</c:mn> <c:mn>15</c:mn> </c:msup> <c:mtext> </c:mtext> <c:mtext> </c:mtext> <c:mi>GeV</c:mi> </c:math> at sufficiently large volumes. Comparing these results with sphaleron rates in a nonthermal SU(N) plasma where the infrared gluons are overoccupied, we estimate the typical thermalization time for these ultrasoft gluons during the early stages of reheating after inflation. We also calculate the thermal production rate of relativistic axions due to these nonperturbatively interacting soft gluons which shows a significant deviation from its perturbative estimate even at the electroweak scale.