Speaker
Lauren Pearce
(University of Minnesota)
Description
The recent observation of a relatively light Higgs boson at the LHC suggests that the Standard Model potential rises relatively slowly at large vacuum expectation values, and may even develop a second minimum. In such cases, the Higgs boson may develop a large vacuum expectation value during inflation; subsequently, it will relax to its equilibrium value. During this epoch, the time-dependent Higgs condensate can create an effective chemical potential for the lepton number, leading to a generation of the lepton asymmetry in the presence of some large right-handed Majorana neutrino masses. The electroweak sphalerons redistribute this asymmetry between leptons and baryons, accounting for the observed cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry.
Author
Lauren Pearce
(University of Minnesota)
Co-authors
Alexander Kusenko
(UCLA)
Louis Yang
(UCLA)
