Global charge conservation in the symmetric phase of the early Universe

Abstract

In the Standard Model at high temperatures, anomalous effects contribute to the violation of baryon number ($B$) and lepton number ($L$), separately, while $B-L$ remains conserved. There are also corresponding changes in the helicity of the hypermagnetic field ($h_B$) and the Chern-Simons numbers of the non-Abelian gauge fields ($N_{\mathrm{CS},\mathrm{w}}$ and $N_{\mathrm{CS},\mathrm{s}}$). In this study, we investigate a baryogenesis process in the symmetric phase of the early Universe by taking into account the Abelian and non-Abelian anomalous effects as well as the perturbative chirality-flip processes of all fermions. We calculate the time evolution of all relevant physical quantities, including the asymmetries of all fermions and the Higgs, as well as $h_B$ and $N_{\mathrm{CS},\mathrm{w}}$. We present a method to compute the latter, for which it is crucial to consider the minute departure from equilibrium of the sphaleron processes. We then verify explicitly the conservation of a global charge, involving the total matter-antimatter asymmetry $B+L$, the hypermagnetic helicity $h_B$ and $N_{\mathrm{CS},\mathrm{w}}$, the existence of which had been inferred earlier. In particular we show that, in the scenario that we study, an initial $h_B$ decays mostly to $N_{\mathrm{CS},\mathrm{w}}$, with only $10^{-3}$ conversion ratio into $B+L$ asymmetry.

Comments: 18 pages, 2 figures; replaced with revised version. Added 2 figures and a new appendix (Appendix B). Page count increased from 18 to 24