Related papers: Thermalisation after inflation
In order for the inflaton to decay into radiation at the end of inflation, it needs to couple to light matter fields. In this article we determine whether such couplings cause the inflaton to decay during inflation rather than after it. We…
We provide a detailed study of reheating in the kination regime where particle content is created by gravitational production of massive scalars mutually interacting with a massless scalar field. The produced particles subsequently decay…
The reheating process for the inflationary scenario is investigated phenomenologically. The decay of the oscillating massive inflaton field into light bosons is modeled after an out of equilibrium mixture of interacting fluids within the…
Heavy-ion colliders have revealed the process of "fast thermalization". This experimental breakthrough has led to new theoretical tools to study the thermalization process at both weak and strong coupling. We apply this to the reheating…
In certain models of inflation, the postinflationary reheating of the Universe is not primarily due to perturbative decay of the inflaton field into particles, but proceeds through a tachyonic instability. In the process, long-wavelength…
We calculate the reheating temperature in scenarios where heavy particles are gravitationally produced during a phase transition. We explore two distinct situations: the decay of these particles both during and after the kination phase.…
The inflationary reheating phase begins when accelerated expansion ends. As all Standard Model particles are coupled to gravity, gravitational interactions will lead to particle production. This includes the thermal bath, dark matter and…
We revisit gravitino production following inflation. As a first step, we review the standard calculation of gravitino production in the thermal plasma formed at the end of post-inflationary reheating when the inflaton has completely…
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…
We have conducted extensive lattice simulations to study the post-inflation dynamics of multifield models involving nonminimal couplings. We explore the parameter dependence of preheating in these models and describe the various time-scales…
It is shown that the efficiency of the universe heating by an inflaton field depends not only on the possible presence of parametric resonance in the production of scalar particles but also strongly depends on the character of the inflaton…
We compute numerically the reheating temperature due to the gravitational production of conformally coupled superheavy particles during the phase transition from the end of inflation to the beginning of kination in two different…
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 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…
A thermal squeezed state representation of inflaton is constructed for a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background metric and the phenomenon of particle creation is examined during the oscillatory phase of inflaton, in the semiclassical…
We investigate the matter creation processes during the reheating period at the end of inflation in the early Universe, by using the irreversible thermodynamic of open systems. The matter content of the Universe is assumed to consist of the…
A new mechanism is presented which can reheat the Universe in non-oscillatory models of inflation, where the inflation period is followed by a period dominated by the kinetic density for the inflaton field (kination). The mechanism…
(abridged)We present a model which predicts inflation without the presence of inflaton fields, based on the \epsilon R^2 and Starobinsky models. It links the above models to the observable universe, in particular, to the ratio r of tensor…
At the end of inflation, the inflaton field decays into an initially nonthermal population of relativistic particles which eventually thermalize. We consider the production of dark matter from this relativistic plasma, focusing on the…
We point out that inflaton decays can be a copious source of stable or long--lived particles $\chi$ with mass exceeding the reheat temperature $T_R$. Once higher order processes are included, this statement is true for any $\chi$ particle…