Abstract
The current status of baryogenesis is reviewed, with an emphasis on electroweak baryogenesis and leptogenesis. The first detailed studies were carried out for grand unified theory (GUT) models where -violating decays of leptoquarks generate a baryon asymmetry. These GUT models were excluded by the discovery of unsuppressed, ()-violating sphaleron processes at high temperatures. Yet a new possibility emerged: electroweak baryogenesis. Here sphaleron processes generate a baryon asymmetry during a strongly first-order phase transition. This mechanism has been studied in detail in many extensions of the standard model. However, constraints from the LHC and from low-energy precision experiments exclude most of the known models, leaving composite Higgs models of electroweak symmetry breaking as an interesting possibility. Sphaleron processes are also the basis of leptogenesis, where -violating decays of heavy right-handed neutrinos generate a lepton asymmetry that is partially converted to a baryon asymmetry. This mechanism is closely related to that of GUT baryogenesis, and simple estimates based on GUT models can explain the order of magnitude of the observed baryon-to-photon ratio. In the one-flavor approximation an upper bound on the light-neutrino masses has been derived that is consistent with the cosmological upper bound on the sum of neutrino masses. For quasidegenerate right-handed neutrinos the leptogenesis temperature can be lowered from the GUT scale down to the weak scale, and -violating oscillations of GeV sterile neutinos can also lead to successful leptogenesis. Significant progress has been made in developing a full field-theoretical description of thermal leptogenesis, which demonstrated that interactions with gauge bosons of the thermal plasma play a crucial role. Finally, recent ideas on how the seesaw mechanism and breaking at the GUT scale can be probed by gravitational waves are discussed.
26 More- Received 15 September 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.93.035004
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