Cascades of high-energy SM particles in the primordial thermal plasma

Abstract

High-energy standard model (SM) particles in the early Universe are generated by the decay of heavy long-lived particles. The subsequent thermalization occurs through the splitting of high-energy primary particles into lower-energy daughters in primordial thermal plasma. The principal example of such processes is reheating after inflation caused by the decay of inflatons into SM particles. Understanding of the thermalization at reheating is extremely important as it reveals the origin of the hot Universe, and could open up new mechanisms for generating dark matter and/or baryon asymmetry. In this paper, we investigate the thermalization of high-energy SM particles in thermal plasma, taking into account the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect in the leading-log approximation. The whole SM particle content and all the relevant SM interactions are included for the first time, i.e., the full gauge interactions of SU(3)c×SU(2)L×U(1)Y and the top Yukawa interaction. The distribution function of each SM species is computed both numerically and analytically. We have analytically obtained the distribution function of each SM species after the first few splittings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, after a sufficient number of splittings, the particle distributions are asymptotic to certain values at low momentum, independent of the high-energy particles injected by inflaton decay. The results are useful to calculate the DM abundance produced during the pre-thermal phase. An example is provided to illustrate a way to calculate the DM abundance from the scattering between the thermal plasma and high-energy particles in the cascade.