The vector channel spectral function at zero spatial momentum is calculated at next-to-leading order in thermal QCD for any quark mass. It corresponds to the imaginary part of the massive quark contribution to the photon polarization tensor. The spec
trum shows a well defined transport peak in contrast to both the heavy quark limit studied previously, where the low frequency domain is exponentially suppressed at this order and the naive massless case where it vanishes at leading order and diverges at next-to-leading order. From our general expressions, the massless limit can be taken and we show that no divergences occur if done carefully. Finally, we compare the massless limit to results from lattice simulations.
In the scenario of cold electroweak baryogenesis, oscillations of the Higgs field lead to metastable domains of unbroken phase where the Higgs field nearly vanishes. Those domains have also been identified with the $W-t-bar{t}$ bags, a non-topologica
l soliton made of large number ($sim 1000$) of gauge quanta and heavy (top and anti-top) quarks. As real-time numerical studies had shown, sphalerons (topological transition events violating the baryon number) occur only inside those bags. In this work we estimate the amount of CP violation in this scenario coming from the Standard Model, via the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) quark mixing matrix, resulting in top-minus-antitop difference of the population in the bags. Since these tops/anti-tops are recycled by sphalerons, this population difference leads directly to the baryonic asymmetry of the Universe. We look at the effect appearing in the 4th order in weak $W$ diagrams describing interference of different quark flavor contributions. We found that there are multiple cancellations of diagrams and clearly sign-definite effect appears only in the 6th order expansion over flavor-dependent phases. We then estimate contributions to these diagrams in which weak interaction occurs (i) inside, (ii) near and (iii) far from the $W-t-bar{t}$ b-bags, optimizing the contributions in each of them. We conclude that the second (near) scenario is the dominant one, producing CP violation of the order of $10^{-10}$, in our crude estimates. Together with the baryon violation rate of about $10^{-2}$, previously demonstrated for this scenario, it puts the resulting asymmetry close to what is needed to explain the observed baryonic asymmetry in the Universe. Our answer also has a definite sign, which apparently seems to be the correct one.
We show that the strong CP problem can, in principle, be solved dynamically by adding extra-dimensions with compact topology. To this aim we consider a toy model for QCD, which contains a vacuum angle and a strong CP like problem. We further consider
a higher dimensional theory, which has a trivial vacuum structure and which reproduces the perturbative properties of the toy model in the low-energy limit. In the weak coupling regime, where our computations are valid, we show that the vacuum structure of the low-energy action is still trivial and the strong CP problem is solved. No axion-like particle occur in this setup and therefore it is not ruled out by astrophysical bounds.
We calculate the four-dimensional low-energy effective action for the perturbations of a two-scalar domain wall model in five dimensions. Comparison of the effective action to the Nambu-Goto action reveals the presence of an additional coupling betwe
en the light scalar field and the massless translation mode (branon excitation), which can be written in terms of the curvature scalar of the induced metric. We comment on the impact of this interaction to branon physics.
