Electroweak strings produce baryons

Abstract

We propose a new mechanism to generate baryons. Electroweak strings produced at the electroweak phase transition will introduce anomalous currents through interactions of the strings with the background electromagnetic field and through changes in the helicity of the string network. These anomalous currents will produce fluctuations in the baryon and lepton number. We show that in the two-Higgs-doublet model corrections to the action coming from the effective potential introduce a bias in the baryon asymmetry that leads to a net baryon number production.