Related papers: Reheating dynamics affects non-perturbative decay …
In this work, we consider homogeneous oscillations of the inflaton field after inflation. In particular, we obtain an analytical result for the (average) equation of state for the oscillating inflaton field for the simplest…
We consider the inflaton as a scalar field described by a non-minimal derivative coupling model with a power law potential. We study the slow roll inflation, the rapid oscillation phase, the radiation dominated and the recombination eras…
We use classical lattice simulations in 3+1 dimensions to study the interplay between the resonant production of particles during preheating and the subsequent decay of these into a set of secondary species. We choose to work in a…
It has recently been proposed that the production of long wavelength Higgs and gauge configurations via parametric resonance at the end of inflation may give rise to the required baryon asymmetry at the electroweak scale. We show that the…
The density perturbations generated when the inflaton decay rate is perturbed by a light scalar field $\chi$ are studied. By explicitly solving the perturbation equations for the system of two scalar fields and radiation, we show that even…
We propose a novel mechanism for gravitational wave (GW) production sourced by spectator scalar fields during inflation. These fields, while not driving cosmic expansion, generate blue-tilted isocurvature fluctuations that naturally satisfy…
We calculate the dissipation rate of a coherently oscillating scalar field in a thermal environment using nonequilibrium quantum field theory and apply it to the reheating stage after cosmic inflation. It is shown that the rate is…
Reheating after inflation can proceed even if the inflaton couples to Standard Model (SM) particles only gravitationally. However, particle production during the transition between de-Sitter expansion and a decelerating Universe is rather…
Perturbations in cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons and large scale structure of the universe are sourced primarily by the curvature perturbation which is widely believed to be produced during inflation. In this paper we present a…
We investigate the effects of large inhomogeneities in both the inflaton field and its momentum. We find that in general, large kinetic perturbations reduce the number of e-folds of inflation. In particular, we observe that inflationary…
In the transition between inflation and reheating, the curvature scalar typically undergoes oscillations which have significant impact on the density of gravitationally produced particles. The commonly used adiabatic vacuum prescription for…
Reheating is essential for transforming the cold, vacuum dominated Universe at the end of inflation into the hot thermal bath required by the Standard Model. In many well motivated inflationary models, however, the inflaton has no direct…
We address the problem of studying the decay of the inflaton field $\phi$ to another scalar field $\chi$ through parametric resonance in the case of a coupling that involves several decay modes. This amounts to the presence of extra…
We study the thermodynamic behavior of a decaying scalar field coupled to a relativistic simple fluid. It is shown that if the decay products are represented by a thermalized bath, its temperature evolution law requires naturally a new…
We revisit the possibility of producing observable tensor modes through a continuous particle production process during inflation. Particularly, we focus on the multi-field realization of inflation where a spectator pseudo-scalar $\sigma$…
In the Einstein frame picture of Starobinky's $R^2$ inflation model, cosmic inflation is driven by a slowly rolling inflaton field, called scalaron, and followed by a coherently oscillating scalaron phase. Since the scalaron oscillates…
During cosmological inflation, it has been suggested that fields coupled to the inflaton can be excited by the slow-rolling inflaton into a quasi-stable non-vacuum state. Within this scenario of ``warm inflation'', this could allow for a…
We analyze in detail the background cosmological evolution of a scalar field coupled to a massless abelian gauge field through an axial term $\frac{\phi}{f_\gamma} F \tilde{F}$, such as in the case of an axion. Gauge fields in this case are…
Inflaton decay inevitably emits gravitons through bremsstrahlung during reheating. We show that the soft part of this emission amplitude, fixed by Weinberg's soft-graviton theorem, becomes an irreducible stochastic gravitational-wave (GW)…
We show that dissipative effects have a significant impact on the evolution of cosmological scalar fields, leading to friction, entropy production and field fluctuations. We explicitly compute the dissipation coefficient for different…