NEUTRINO MASSES AND THE BARYON ASYMMETRY

Due to sphaleron processes in the high-temperature symmetric phase of the standard model the cosmological baryon asymmetry is related to neutrino properties. For hierarchical neutrino masses, with B-L broken at the unification scale Λ_GUT~10¹⁶ GeV, the observed baryon asymmetry n_B/s~10^-10 can be naturally explained by the decay of heavy Majorana neutrinos. We illustrate this mechanism with two models of neutrino masses, consistent with the solar and atmospheric neutrino anomalies, which are based on the two symmetry groups SU(5)×U(1)_F and SU(3)_c×SU(3)_L×SU(3)_R×U(1)_F. We also review related cosmological bounds on Majorana neutrino masses and the use of Boltzmann equations.