Constraints and Transport in Electroweak Baryogenesis

Abstract

In unconstrained thermal equilibrium a local potential for total or fermionic hypercharge does not bias electroweak anomalous processes. We consider two proposed mechanisms for electroweak baryogenesis in this light. In `spontaneous' baryogenesis, which was argued to apply in the `adiabatic' limit of thick, slow walls, a non-zero result was obtained by setting globally conserved charges to be zero {\it locally}. We show that this is a poor approximation unless the walls are very thick. For more realistic wall thicknesses the local equilibrium approached as the wall velocity $v_w\rightarrow 0$ has zero baryon number violation and nonzero global charges on the wall. In the `charge transport' mechanism, argued to apply to the case of thin fast walls, calculations of the magnitude of the asymmetry also involve the same error. In corrected calculations the local values of global charges should be determined dynamically rather than fixed locally to zero.