A perturbative production of massive Z bosons and fermion–antifermion pairs from the vacuum in the de Sitter Universe

Abstract

In this paper we study the problem of neutral electro-weak interactions in a de Sitter geometry. We develop the formalism of reduction for the Proca field with the help of the solutions for the interacting fields and by using perturbative methods we obtain the definition of the transition amplitudes in the first order of perturbation theory. As an application to our formalism we study the generation of massive fermions and Z bosons from vacuum in the expanding de Sitter universe. Our results are the generalization to the curved geometry of the Weinberg–Salam electro-weak theory for the case of Z boson interaction with leptons. The probability is found to be a quantity that depends on the Hubble parameter and we prove that such perturbative processes are possible only for large expansion regime of the early Universe. The total probability and rate of transition are obtained for the case of large expansion and we use the dimensional regularization for extract finite results from the momenta integrals. In the Minkowski limit we obtain that the probability of particle generation from vacuum is vanishing recovering the well known result that forbids particle production in flat space-time due to the momentum-energy conservation.