Related papers: Resonant Reheating
Following inflation, the Universe may pass through an early matter-dominated phase supported by the oscillating inflaton condensate. Initially small fluctuations in the condensate grow gravitationally on subhorizon scales and can collapse…
We study the details of preheating in an inflationary scenario in which the Standard Model Higgs, strongly non-minimally coupled to gravity, plays the role of the inflaton. We find that the Universe does not reheat immediately through…
The reheating process in inflationary universe models is considered as an out-of-equilibrium mixture of two interacting and reacting fluids, and studied within the framework of causal, irreversible thermodynamics. The evolution of the…
We explore various aspects concerning the role of vector bosons during the reheating process. Generally, reheating occurs during the period of oscillations of the inflaton condensate and the evolution of the radiation bath depends on the…
We study the reheating phase following inflation in the context of single-field models, focusing on the perturbative decay of the inflaton into lighter particles. A general analytical framework is presented to compute the reheating…
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…
During preheating after inflation, parametric resonance rapidly generates very large fluctuations of scalar fields. In models where the inflaton field $\phi$ oscillates in a double-well potential and interacts with another scalar field $X$,…
We consider preheating in the theory $1/4 \lambda \phi^4 + 1/2 g^2\phi^2\chi^2 $, where the classical oscillating inflaton field $\phi$ decays into $\chi$-particles and $\phi$-particles. The parametric resonance which leads to particle…
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 paradigm of the inflationary universe provides a possible explanation for several observed cosmological properties. In order for such solutions to be successful, the universe must convert the energy stored in the inflaton potential into…
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…
We study preheating after hilltop inflation where the inflaton couples to another scalar field, e.g. a right-handed sneutrino, which provides a mechanism for generating the correct initial conditions for inflation and also a decay channel…
We discuss a model in which high energy brane corrections allow a single scalar field to describe inflation at early epochs and quintessence at late times. The reheating mechanism in the model originates from Born-Infeld matter whose energy…
In the first stages of inflationary reheating, the temperature of the radiation produced by inflaton decays is typically higher than the commonly defined reheating temperature $T_{RH} \sim (\Gamma_\phi M_P)^{1/2}$ where $\Gamma_\phi$ is the…
An analytic means of studying the resonant decay of the inflaton field is developed for the case of background expansion, $H \neq 0$. It is shown that the parametric resonance in the inflaton's decay need not disappear when the expansion of…
A low reheating temperature is now well motivated by the recently reconsidered gravitino problem, if we incorporate supergravity. In this article, we propose a model which naturally realizes a low reheating temperature. The model is based…
In traditional models only an order one fraction of energy is transferred from the inflaton to radiation through nonperturbative resonance production in preheating immediately after inflation, due to backreaction effects. We propose a…
We investigate the effects of local features in the inflationary potential on the preheating dynamics after inflation. We show that a small feature in the potential can enhance the resonance and bring the radiation-like state equation…
The reheating stage in post-inflationary cosmologies is reanalyzed. New techniques from non-equilibrium quantum field theory allow a consistent derivation of the equation of motion including the non-linearity of the dynamics. These offer a…
We present a simple formula that allows to calculate the value of the inflaton field, denoted by $\phi$, at the scale with wavenumber mode $k$. In the extreme case of instantaneous reheating $\phi_k$ is calculated exactly and all…