Lepton asymmetry creation in the Early Universe

Abstract

Oscillations of active to sterile neutrinos with a small mixing angle sin 2 \theta < 10^{-2} could generate a large lepton asymmetry in the Early Universe. The final order of magnitude of the lepton asymmetry \eta is mainly determined by its growth in the last stage of evolution, the so called power-law regime. There exist two contradictory results in the literature, \eta \propto T^{-1} and \eta \propto T^{-4}, where T is the background medium temperature. In the first case, the lepton asymmetry does not exceed values of 10^{-4} for |\delta m^2| < 1 eV^2, while in the second case it can become larger than 10^{-1}. In this work we analytically investigate the case \eta \propto T^{-1}, using a new approach to solve the kinetic equations. We find that the power-law solution \eta \propto T^{-1} is not self-consistent. Instead, we find the power law \eta \propto T^{-11/3} to be a good approximation, which leads to a large final asymmetry.