Gravi-Leptogenesis: Leptogenesis from Gravity Waves in Pseudo-scalar Driven Inflation Models

In this talk we present a mechanism for leptogenesis which is based on gravity waves produced during inflation. We show that when inflation is driven by a pseudo-scalar field the metric perturbations generated during inflation can become birefringent, therefore giving a non-vanishing contribution to the gravitational triangle anomaly and sourcing lepton anti-lepton asymmetry. As this asymmetry is sourced by the fields which are active during inflation, it is not washed out or diluted by inflation. The amount of matter asymmetry generated in our model can be of realistic size for the parameters within the range of some inflationary scenarios and grand unified theories. This talk is based on Ref.[1] which has appeared on the arXiv as hep-th/0403069

Can the string scale be related to the cosmic baryon asymmetry?

In a previous work, a mechanism was presented by which baryon asymmetry can be generated during inflation from elliptically polarized gravitons. Nonetheless, the mechanism only generated a realistic baryon asymmetry under special circumstances which requires an enhancement of the lepton number from an unspecified GUT. In this note we provide a stringy embedding of this mechanism through the Green-Schwarz mechanism, demonstrating that if the model-independent axion is the source of the gravitational waves responsible for the lepton asymmetry, one can observationally constrain the string scale and coupling.Comment: 12 Pages, typo corrected in the tex

Leptogenesis from Gravity Waves in Models of Inflation

We present a new mechanism for creating the observed cosmic matter-antimatter asymmetry which satisfies all three Sakharov conditions from one common thread, gravitational waves. We generate lepton number through the gravitational anomaly in the lepton number current. The source term comes from elliptically polarizated gravity waves that are produced during inflation if the inflaton field contains a CP-odd component. In simple inflationary scenarios, the generated matter asymmetry is very small. We describe some special conditions in which our mechanism can give a matter asymmetry of realistic size.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX4.1 format; an error in computations correcte

Completing Natural Inflation

If the inflaton is a pseudo-scalar axion, the axion shift symmetry can protect the flatness of its potential from too large radiative corrections. This possibility, known as natural inflation, requires an axion scale which is greater than the (reduced) Planck scale. It is unclear whether such a high value is compatible with an effective field theoretical description, and if the global axionic symmetry survives quantum gravity effects. We propose a mechanism which provides an effective large axion scale, although the original one is sub-Planckian. The mechanism is based on the presence of two axions, with a potential provided by two anomalous gauge groups. The effective large axion scale is due to an almost exact symmetry between the couplings of the axions to the anomalous groups. We also comment on a possible implementation in heterotic string theory.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur