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arXiv · hep-ph/0012097

Electroweak preheating on a lattice

Abstract

In many inflationary models, a large amount of energy is transferred rapidly to the long-wavelength matter fields during a period of preheating after inflation. We study how this changes the dynamics of the electroweak phase transition if inflation ends at the electroweak scale. We simulate a classical SU(2)xU(1)+Higgs model with initial conditions in which the energy is concentrated in the long-wavelength Higgs modes. With a suitable initial energy density, the electroweak symmetry is restored non-thermally but broken again when the fields thermalize. During this symmetry restoration, baryon number is violated, and we measure its time evolution, pointing out that it is highly non-Brownian. This makes it difficult to estimate the generated baryon asymmetry.

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A. Rajantie, P. M. Saffin, E. J. Copeland. 2001-05-25. Electroweak preheating on a lattice. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.63.123512

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