Related papers: Heavy particle production during reheating
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
What is commonly called the reheat temperature, $T_{RH}$, is not the maximum temperature obtained after inflation. The maximum temperature is, in fact, much larger than $T_{RH}$. As an application of this we consider the production of…
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…
All species of (non-conformally-coupled) particles are produced during inflation so long as their mass $M$ is not too much larger than $H$, the expansion rate during inflation. It has been shown that if a particle species that is normally…
Cosmological reheating bridges the inflationary epoch and the hot big bang phase, yet its underlying dynamics remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate a minimal scenario in which the inflaton evolves under a simple power-law…
In this article we calculate the reheating temperature in the cosmological scenarios where heavy scalar particles are gravitationally produced, due to a conformally coupled interaction between a massive scalar quantum field and the Ricci…
Reheating after inflation can occur through inflaton decay or efficient parametric resonant production of particles from the oscillation of the inflaton. If the particles produced interact with scalars that were light during inflation, then…
At high temperatures, gravitinos are generated in inelastic scattering processes with particles that are in thermal equilibrium with the hot primordial plasma. We consider the regeneration of gravitinos that starts with completion of…
We perform a systematic analysis of dark matter production during post-inflationary reheating. Following the period of exponential expansion, the inflaton begins a period of damped oscillations as it decays. These oscillations and the…
We describe a simple and efficient mechanism by which very heavy particles are copiously created from a primordial inflationary epoch. It works for scalar fields which are massless or very light during inflation and acquire a large mass…
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.…
We calculate the number density and the energy density of a massive scalar particle conformally coupled to gravity produced by gravitational particle creation in the case the kination stage follows inflation. In this model, mode functions…
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…
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…
We examine the particle production via preheating at the end of inflation in supersymmetric theories. The inflaton and matter scalars are now necessarily complex fields, and their relevant interactions are restricted by holomorphy. In…
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…