Fermion Self-Energy during Inflation

Abstract

I report on work done with Tomislav Prokopec (Heidelberg, CERN). We computed the one loop self-energy of a massless fermion during inflation. When the fermion is free it experiences only a small amount of inflationary particle production owing to the conformal invariance of its classical action. However, when the fermion is Yukawa coupled to a massless, minimally coupled scalar, there is copious production of fermions. In a more complicated model this effect might generate baryon asymmetry during inflation.