Speaker
Description
We have discussed our new lattice results for the sphaleron rate calculated within a thermal effective field theory of soft SU(N) gluons whose momenta are below the magnetic scale, where $N=2,3$, for a wide range of temperatures spanning from $0.6$ to $10^{15}$ GeV at sufficiently large volumes. We have shown that our result for the sphaleron rate matches the parametric estimate at very high temperatures where the strong coupling $g<<1$. Comparing these results with sphaleron rates in a nonthermal SU(N) plasma where the infrared gluons are overoccupied, we estimate the typical thermalization time for these ultrasoft gluons during the early stages of reheating after inflation. We also calculate the thermal axion production rate due to these non-perturbatively interacting soft gluons, which shows a significant deviation from its perturbative estimate even at the electroweak scale.