Supersymmetric Leptogenesis

TL;DR

This paper investigates how supersymmetry alters leptogenesis mechanisms, revealing new symmetries and constraints that affect lepton asymmetry generation and chemical potential relations.

Contribution

It identifies key qualitative differences in supersymmetric leptogenesis, including new symmetry effects and chemical potential constraints, extending the understanding beyond non-supersymmetric models.

Findings

Lepton and scalar asymmetries do not equilibrate in supersymmetry.

Electroweak sphalerons couple to winos and higgsinos, modifying equilibrium conditions.

Numerical differences from standard treatments are of order one.

Abstract

We study leptogenesis in the supersymmetric standard model plus the seesaw. We identify important qualitative differences that characterize supersymmetric leptogenesis with respect to the non-supersymmetric case. The lepton number asymmetries in fermions and scalars do not equilibrate, and are related via a non-vanishing gaugino chemical potential. Due to the presence of new anomalous symmetries, electroweak sphalerons couple to winos and higgsinos, and QCD sphalerons couple to gluinos, thus modifying the corresponding chemical equilibrium conditions. A new constraint on particles chemical potentials corresponding to an exactly conserved $R$-charge, that also involves the number density asymmetry of the heavy sneutrinos, appears. These new ingredients determine the $3\times 4$ matrices that mix up the density asymmetries of the lepton flavours and of the heavy sneutrinos. We explain why in all temperature ranges the particle thermodynamic system is characterized by the same number of independent quantities. Numerical differences with respect to usual treatment remain at the ${\cal O}(1)$ level.