Related papers: Post-inflationary thermalization with hadronizatio…
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…
According to the standard lore, a prolonged inflation leaves a quantum field theory in a cold, low entropy state. Thus, some mechanism is needed to reheat this post-inflationary state, leaving a hot, thermal, radiation-dominated Universe.…
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.…
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…
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 problem of scalar particle production after inflation by a rapidly oscillating inflaton field. We use the framework of the chaotic inflation scenario with quartic and quadratic inflaton potentials. Particular attention is paid…
We reexamine the scenario of homogeneous nucleation of the quark-gluon plasma produced in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. A generalization of the standard nucleation theory to rapidly expanding system is proposed. The nucleation…
The quark-hadron phase transition in the early universe can produce inhomogeneities in the distribution of nucleons, which in turn affect the primordial nucleosynthesis. In all the investigations of this problem it has been assumed that the…
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 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 consider the case of a scalar field, the inflaton, coupled to both lighter scalars and fermions, and the study the relaxation of the inflaton via particle production in both the linear and non-linear regimes. This has an immediate…
If reheating of the Universe takes place via Planck-suppressed decay, it seems that the thermalization of produced particles might be delayed, since they have large energy/small number densities and number violating large angle scatterings…
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…
This is an introduction to the study of strongly interacting matter. We survey its different possible states and discuss the transition from hadronic matter to a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons. Following this, we summarize the…
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…
We reanalyze the conditions under which we have a primordial thermal population of axions. Compared with previous studies, we find other processes, involving gluons and quarks, that dominate at high temperatures. We conclude that if the…
We describe the energy distribution of hard gluons travelling through a dense quark-gluon plasma whose temperature increases linearly with time, within a probabilistic perturbative approach. The results were applied to the thermalization…
We propose the first model of warm inflation in which the particle production emerges directly from coupling the inflaton to Standard Model particles. Warm inflation, an early epoch of sustained accelerated expansion at finite temperature,…
We consider time-scales of first-order deconfinement or chiral-symmetry restoring phase transition in high energy heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC energies. Recently it was shown that the system must supercool below $T_c$ before the…
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…