Preheating and Affleck-Dine leptogenesis after thermal inflation

Abstract

We consider a model of low energy Affleck-Dine leptogenesis in the context of thermal inflation. The lepton asymmetry is generated at the end of thermal inflation, which occurs at a relatively low energy scale with the Hubble parameter somewhere in the range $1 \keV \lesssim H \lesssim 1 \MeV$. Thus Hubble damping will be ineffective in bringing the Affleck-Dine field into the lepton conserving region near the origin, leaving the possibility that the lepton number could be washed out. We suggest that preheating can damp the amplitude of the Affleck-Dine field allowing conservation of the lepton number. In this paper, we demonstrate numerically that preheating does efficiently damp the amplitude of the Affleck-Dine field and that the lepton number is conserved as the result. In addition to demonstrating a crucial aspect of our model, it also opens the more general possibility of low energy Affleck-Dine baryogenesis.