English

Bremsstrahlung-induced Gravitational Waves in Monomial Potentials during Reheating

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2023-09-26 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

We discuss the production of primordial gravitational waves (GW) from radiative inflaton decay during the period of reheating, assuming perturbative decay of the inflaton either into a pair of bosons or fermions, leading to successful reheating satisfying constraint from Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Assuming that the inflaton ϕ\phi oscillates in a general monomial potential V(ϕ)ϕnV(\phi)\propto \phi^n, which results in a time-dependent inflaton decay width, we show that the resulting stochastic GW background can have optimistic detection prospects, especially in detectors that search for a high-frequency GW spectrum, depending on the choice of nn that determines the shape of the potential during reheating. We also discuss how this GW energy density may affect the measurement of ΔNeff\Delta N_{\text{eff}} for bosonic and fermionic reheating scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.16388,
  title  = {Bremsstrahlung-induced Gravitational Waves in Monomial Potentials during Reheating},
  author = {Basabendu Barman and Nicolás Bernal and Yong Xu and Óscar Zapata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.16388},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

V1: 22 pages, 4 figures, comments welcome; V2: minor change with footnote 4, version accepted for publication in PRD

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:46:41.332Z