2014/08/31 by Kaloian D. Lozanov, Mustafa A. Amin · 2 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Antimatter #Asymmetry #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution #Inflation (cosmology) #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Physics #Positron #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #Theoretical physics #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph #hep-th #nlin.PS
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.90.083528
published as Phys. Rev. D 90, 083528 (2014) · 19 pages, 9 figures. v3: references added and minor changes in text. Published in Phys. Rev. D
openalex publication_date 2014/10/29 · arxiv created 2014/12/04 · arxiv updated 2014/12/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The dynamics at the end of inflation can generate an asymmetry between particles and antiparticles of the inflaton field. This asymmetry can be transferred to baryons via decays, generating a baryon asymmetry in our Universe. We explore this idea in detail for a complex inflaton governed by an observationally consistent---``flatter than quadratic''---potential with a weakly broken global U(1) symmetry. We find that most of the inflaton asymmetry is locked in nontopological soliton-like configurations (oscillons) produced copiously at the end of inflation. These solitons eventually decay into baryons and generate the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry for a range of model parameters. Through a combination of three dimensional lattice simulations and a detailed linearized analysis, we show how the inflaton asymmetry depends on the fragmentation, the magnitude of the symmetry breaking term and initial conditions at the end of inflation. We discuss the final decay into baryons, but leave a detailed analysis of the inhomogeneous annihilation, reheating and thermalization to future work. As part of our work, we pay particular attention to generating multifield initial conditions for the field fluctuations (including metric perturbations) at the end of inflation for lattice simulations.