Flavor leptogenesis during the reheating era

Recently, it has been shown that the presence of a noninstantaneous era of reheating can significantly alter the charged lepton (s) equilibration temperature (s) which plays an important role in flavor leptogenesis. In this work, we extend the analysis to a more general situation where right-handed neutrinos (RHNs) are also produced from the decay of the inflaton. The presence of these RHNs along with the thermally generated ones (above its mass equivalent temperature only) redistributes different components of the energy density of the Universe during this reheating era, thereby affecting the charged lepton equilibration temperature (in addition to the Hubble effect) as well as the final reheating temperature Tₑ₇. Taking both the effects into account, we find that the decay of the lightest RHN in the setup not only provides a platform to study flavor leptogenesis during reheating, but also an interesting framework of quasi-thermal leptogenesis emerges.