English

Probing Bose-enhanced Inflaton Decay with Gravitational Waves

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-05-13 v2

Abstract

We investigate cosmic reheating dynamics in the presence of a transient condensate formed by bosonic decay products of the inflaton. We show that the emergence of such a condensate and the corresponding Bose enhancement can dramatically increase the efficiency of inflaton decay, giving rise to qualitatively new reheating dynamics beyond the standard perturbative picture. As a consequence, graviton production from inflaton decay processes is significantly amplified by Bose enhancement effects, leading to a stochastic gravitational-wave background with a potentially observable amplitude, even in the low-frequency regime.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.20939,
  title  = {Probing Bose-enhanced Inflaton Decay with Gravitational Waves},
  author = {Nicolás Bernal and Quan-feng Wu and Xun-Jie Xu and Yong Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.20939},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

18+10 pages, 4 figures; minor changes; version accepted for publication in JHEP

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:24:29.833Z