Related papers: When Does the Inflaton Decay?
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…
The spectrum of adiabatic density perturbation generated during inflation is studied in the case the time derivative of an inflation-driving scalar field (inflaton) vanishes at some time during inflation. It is shown that the nondecaying…
If the inflaton decays into several components during reheating, and if the corresponding decay rates are functions of spacetime-dependent quantities, it is possible to generate entropy perturbations after a stage of single-field inflation.…
We study the possibility that, after inflation, the inflaton reaches thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model thermal bath and eventually freezes-out in the non-relativistic regime. When the inflaton decay is the sole source of…
The fluctuations in the inflaton field at the end of inflation which seed the density perturbations are prepared in a pure quantum state. It is generally assumed that some physics causes this pure state to decohere so that it should be…
We examine the spectrum of inflaton fluctuations resulting from any given long period of exponential inflation. Infrared and ultraviolet divergences in the inflaton dispersion summed over all modes do not appear in our approach. We show how…
We study parametric resonant decay of inflaton field with emphasis on its physical meaning. We show that the parametric resonance is indeed an induced process, which means that the more numbers of produced particles, the more inflaton field…
We numerically compute features in the power-spectrum that originate from the decay of fields during inflation. Using a simple, phenomenological, multi-field setup, we increase the number of fields from a few to thousands. Whenever a field…
Within the framework of an explicit dynamical model, in which we calculate the radiatively-corrected, tree-level potential that sets up inflation, we show that the inflaton can be a significant part of dark matter today. We exhibit…
We study the decay of scalar fields, in particular the inflaton, into lighter scalars in a De Sitter spacetime background. After providing a practical definition of the rate, we focus on the case of an inflaton interacting with a massless…
The decay of the inflaton into radiation and particles during the slow-roll suggests that these may interact with each other and that the latter may also decay into subproducts before inflation is completed. As a consequence, the fluid is…
We analyze in detail the perturbative decay of the inflaton oscillating about a generic form of its potential $V(\phi) = \phi^k$, taking into account the effects of non-instantaneous reheating. We show that evolution of the temperature as a…
We point out that the inflaton inevitably couples to all non-conformally coupled matters gravitationally through an oscillation in the Hubble parameter or the cosmic scale factor. It leads to particle production during the inflaton…
In the presence of self-interactions, the post-inflationary evolution of the inflaton field is driven into the non-linear regime by the resonant growth of its fluctuations. The once spatially homogeneous coherent inflaton is converted into…
We analyze the evolution of the perturbations in the inflaton field and metric following the end of inflation. We present accurate analytic approximations for the perturbations, showing that the coherent oscillations of the…
It is shown that perturbative reheating can reach a sufficiently high temperature with small or negligible inflaton decay rate provided that the inflaton potential becomes negative after inflation. In our model, inflaton and dark energy…
Inflation ends with the formation of a Bose condensate of inflatons. We show that in hybrid inflation models this condensate is typically unstable with respect to spatial perturbations and can fragment to condensate lumps. The case of…
How much does the curvature perturbation change after it leaves the horizon, and when should one evaluate the power spectrum? To answer these questions we study single field inflation models numerically, and compare the evolution of…
We present a gauge-invariant formalism to study the evolution of the curvature and entropy perturbations in the case in which spatial and time variations of the inflaton decay rate into ordinary matter are present. During the reheating…
We point out that supergravity effects enable the inflaton to decay into all matter fields, including the visible and the supersymmetry breaking sectors, once the inflaton acquires a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value. The new decay…