Recent progress in Affleck-Dine baryogenesis

Abstract

In the MSSM, cosmological scalar field condensates formed along flat directions of the scalar potential (Affleck-Dine condensates) are typically unstable with respect to formation of Q-balls, a type of non-topological soliton. I discuss the creation and growth of the quantum seed fluctuations which catalyse the collapse of the condensate. In D-term inflation models, the fluctuations of squark fields in the flat directions also give rise to isocurvature density fluctuations stored in the Affleck-Dine condensate. After the condensate breaks up, these can be perturbations in the baryon number, or, in the case where the present neutralino density comes directly from B-ball decay, perturbations in the number of dark matter neutralinos. The latter case results in a large enhancement of the isocurvature perturbation, which should be observable by PLANCK.