Quintessential Affleck-Dine baryogenesis with non-minimal couplings

Understand

We present a novel Affleck-Dine scenario for the generation of the observed baryon asymmetry of the Universe based on the non-trivial interplay between quintessential inflationary models containing a kinetic dominated post-inflationary era and a non-minimally coupled $U(1)$ field with a weakly broken $B-L$ symmetry.

• The non-minimal coupling to gravity renders heavy the Affleck-Dine field during inflation and avoids the generation of isocurvature fluctuations.
• During the subsequent kinetic era the Ricci scalar changes sign and the effective mass term of the Affleck-Dine field becomes tachyonic.
• This allows the field to dynamically acquire a large expectation value.