English

Reheating in Inflationary Cosmology: Theory and Applications

High Energy Physics - Theory 2011-02-03 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Reheating is an important part of inflationary cosmology. It describes the production of Standard Matter particles after the phase of accelerated expansion. We give a review of the reheating process, focusing on an in-depth discussion of the preheating stage which is characterized by exponential particle production due to a parametric resonance or tachyonic instability. We give a brief overview of the thermalization process after preheating and end with a survey of some applications to supersymmetric theories and to other issues in cosmology such as baryogenesis, dark matter and metric preheating.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1001.2600,
  title  = {Reheating in Inflationary Cosmology: Theory and Applications},
  author = {Rouzbeh Allahverdi and Robert Brandenberger and Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine and Anupam Mazumdar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.2600},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

Draft of commissioned review article for Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Science, comments welcome! A few references added in this version