Preheating and Affleck–Dine leptogenesis after thermal inflation

Abstract

Previously, we proposed a model of low energy Affleck–Dine leptogenesis in the contextof thermal inflation. The lepton asymmetry is generated at the end of thermalinflation, which occurs at a relatively low energy scale with the Hubble parametersomewhere in the range . Thus Hubble damping will be ineffective in bringing the Affleck–Dine field into the leptonconserving region near the origin, leaving the possibility that the lepton number could bewashed out. Previously, we suggested that preheating could damp the amplitude of theAffleck–Dine field allowing conservation of the lepton number. In this paper, wedemonstrate numerically that preheating does efficiently damp the amplitude of theAffleck–Dine field and that the lepton number is conserved as the result. In addition todemonstrating a crucial aspect of our model, it also opens the more general possibility oflow energy Affleck–Dine baryogenesis.