Related papers: Thermalization after/during Reheating
We present a detailed examination of thermalization after inflation for perturbative inflaton decay. Different interactions among particles in the plasma of inflaton decay products are considered and it will be shown that 2 -> 2 scatterings…
We discuss thermalization through perturbative inflaton decay at the end of inflation. We find that a thermal plasma should form well before all inflatons have decayed, unless all gauge symmetries are badly broken during that epoch.…
During (re)heating of the universe after inflation, the relativistic decay products of the inflaton field $\phi$ must lose energy and additional particles must be produced to attain a thermalised state at a temperature $T_{\reh}$. We…
We investigate the thermalization process of the Universe after inflation to determine the evolution of the effective temperature. The time scale of thermalization is found to be so long that it delays the evolution of the effective…
We point out that inflaton decay products acquire plasma masses during the reheating phase following inflation. The plasma masses may render inflaton decay kinematicaly forbidden, causing the temperature to remain frozen for a period at a…
Reheating is a process where the energy density of a dominant component of the universe other than radiation, such as a matter component, is transferred into radiation. It is usually assumed that the temperature of the universe decreases…
Heavy long-lived particles are abundant in BSM physics and will, under generic circumstances, get to dominate the energy density of the universe. The resulting matter dominated era has to end before the onset of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis…
Symmetry restoration processes during the non-equilibrium stage of ``preheating'' after inflation is studied. It is shown that symmetry restoration is very efficient when the majority of created particles are concentrated at energies much…
We study thermalization of the early Universe when the inflaton can decay into the Standard Model (SM) quarks and gluons, using QCD arguments. We describe the possible formation of the thermal plasma of soft gluons and quarks well before…
The inflaton must convert its energy into radiation after inflation, which, in a conventional scenario, is caused by the perturbative inflaton decay. This reheating process would be much more complicated in some cases: the decay products…
We revisit the non-thermal dark matter (DM) production during the thermalization and reheating era after inflation. The decay of inflaton produces high-energy particles that are thermalized to complete the reheating of the Universe. Before…
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…
We consider the conditions for the decay products of perturbative inflaton decay to thermalize. The importance of considering the full spectrum of inflaton decay products in the thermalization process is emphasized. It is shown that the…
We study the two-phase scenario following inflation, where the initial step is preheating, accompanied by a step of perturbative reheating at which inflaton field decays transferring all of its energy to create relativistic particles, the…
We estimate dark matter density for the Universe with a reheating temperature smaller than the mass of dark matter, assuming dark matter to be a weakly interacting massive particle. During the reheating process, an inflaton decays and…
The theory of reheating of the Universe after inflation is developed. The transition from inflation to the hot Universe turns out to be strongly model-dependent and typically consists of several stages. Immediately after inflation the field…
Different well-know ways to reheat the universe such as instant preheating, the creation of particles nearly or conformally coupled with gravity, or from the decay products of a curvaton field, are revisited and discussed in detail in the…
We calculate the relaxation rate of a scalar field in a plasma of other scalars and fermions with gauge interactions using thermal quantum field theory. It yields the rate of cosmic reheating and thereby determines the temperature of the…
After inflation the Universe presumably undergoes a phase of reheating which in effect starts the thermal big bang cosmology. However, so far we have very little direct experimental or observational evidence of this important phase of the…
Hydrodynamical analysis of experimental data of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions seems to indicate that the hot QCD matter created in the collisions thermalizes very quickly. Theoretically, we have no idea why this should be true. In…