Right-Handed Neutrino Production by an Axion-like Inflaton: Implications for Leptogenesis

We study heavy right-handed neutrino production induced by a derivative coupling to an axion-like inflaton and its implications for non-thermal leptogenesis. We develop a unified treatment of Majorana-fermion production during inflation and preheating. During inflation, the rolling inflaton background generates a helicity-asymmetric spectrum that can be obtained analytically in the slow-roll regime, while during preheating the oscillating background drives repeated non-adiabatic production events with a helicity-dependent effective momentum and a natural momentum cutoff. We compute the resulting abundance in both the delayed-decay and prompt-decay limits, including the effects of Pauli blocking and successive production stages. We further clarify the relation between the fermion basis used to identify non-adiabatic production and the Hamiltonian-diagonal basis used to define instantaneous occupation numbers. Applying these results to non-thermal leptogenesis, we identify parameter regions consistent with the observed baryon asymmetry.