Baryogenesis from mixing of lepton doublets

It is shown that the mixing of lepton doublets of the Standard Model can yield sizable contributions to the lepton asymmetry, that is generated through the decays of right-handed neutrinos at finite temperature in the early Universe. When calculating the flavour-mixing correlations, we account for the effects of Yukawa as well as of gauge interactions. We compare the freeze-out asymmetry from lepton-doublet mixing to the standard contributions from the mixing and direct decays of right-handed neutrinos. The asymmetry from lepton mixing is considerably large when the mass ratio between the right-handed neutrinos is of order of a few, while it becomes Maxwell-suppressed for larger hierarchies. For an intermediate range between the case of degenerate right-handed neutrinos (resonant leptogenesis) and the hierarchical case, lepton mixing can yield the main contribution to the lepton asymmetry. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.