Damping rates and mean free paths of soft fermion collective excitations in a hot fermion-gauge-scalar theory

Abstract

We study the transport coefficients, damping rates, and mean free paths of soft fermion collective excitations in a hot fermion-gauge-scalar plasma with the goal of understanding the main physical mechanisms that determine transport of chirality in scenarios of nonlocal electroweak baryogenesis. The focus is on identifying the different transport coefficients for the different branches of soft collective excitations of the fermion spectrum. These branches correspond to collective excitations with opposite ratios of chirality to helicity and different dispersion relations. By combining results from the hard thermal loop (HTL) resummation program with a novel mechanism of fermion damping through heavy scalar decay, we obtain a robust description of the different damping rates and mean free paths for the soft collective excitations to leading order in HTL and lowest order in the Yukawa coupling. The space-time evolution of wave packets of collective excitations unambiguously reveals the respective mean free paths. We find that whereas both the gauge and scalar contribution to the damping rates are different for the different branches, the difference of mean free paths for both branches is mainly determined by the decay of the heavy scalar into a hard fermion and a soft collective excitation. We argue that these mechanisms are robust and are therefore relevant for nonlocal scenarios of baryogenesis either in the standard model or extensions thereof.