Non-thermal leptogenesis with strongly hierarchical right handed neutrinos

Assuming the Dirac-type neutrino masses m_D are related to quark or charged lepton masses, neutrino oscillation data indicate that right handed neutrino masses are in general strongly hierarchical. In particular, if m_D is similar to the up-type quark masses, the mass of the lightest right handed neutrino M_1<~10^6 GeV. We show that non-thermal leptogenesis by inflaton decay can yield sufficient baryon asymmetry despite this constraint, and discuss how the asymmetry is correlated with the low energy neutrino masses and CP-violating phases.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. v2: added some comments and references, v3: minor corrections and additions, v4: a typo corrected, published versio

Chaotic inflation, radiative corrections and precision cosmology

We employ chaotic (phi^2 and phi^4) inflation to illustrate the important role radiative corrections can play during the inflationary phase. Yukawa interactions of phi, in particular, lead to corrections of the form -kappa phi^4 ln(phi/mu), where kappa>0 and mu is a renormalization scale. For instance, phi^4 chaotic inflation with radiative corrections looks compatible with the most recent WMAP (5 year) analysis, in sharp contrast to the tree level case. We obtain the 95% confidence limits 2.4x10^-14<~kappa<~5.7x10^-14, 0.931<~n_s<~0.958 and 0.038<~r<~0.205, where n_s and r respectively denote the scalar spectral index and scalar to tensor ratio. The limits for phi^2 inflation are kappa<~7.7x10^-15, 0.929<~n_s<~0.966 and 0.023<~r<~0.135. The next round of precision experiments should provide a more stringent test of realistic chaotic phi^2 and phi^4 inflation.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. v2: added comments and references. v3: changed title, published versio

Unparticle physics with broken scale invariance

If scale invariance is exact, unparticles are unlikely to be probed in colliders since there are stringent constraints from astrophysics and cosmology. However these constraints are inapplicable if scale invariance is broken at a scale mu >~ 1 GeV. The case 1 GeV <~ mu < M_Z is particularly interesting since it allows unparticles to be probed at and below the Z pole. We show that mu can naturally be in this range if only vector unparticles exist, and briefly remark on implications for Higgs phenomenology. We then obtain constraints on unparticle parameters from e+ e- -> mu+ mu- cross-section and forward-backward asymmetry data, and compare with the constraints from mono-photon production and the Z hadronic width.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, 2 table