Baryogenesis via gauge field production from a relaxing Higgs

Understand

We show that the baryon asymmetry of the universe can be explained in models where the Higgs couples to the Chern-Simons term of the hypercharge group and is away from the late-time minimum of its potential during inflation.

• The Higgs then relaxes toward this minimum once inflation ends which leads to the production of (hyper)magnetic helicity.
• We discuss the conditions under which this helicity can be approximately conserved during its joint evolution with the thermal plasma.
• At the electroweak phase transition the helicity is then converted into a baryon asymmetry by virtue of the chiral anomaly in the standard model.