Related papers: Post-inflationary thermalization with hadronizatio…
We study, analytically and with lattice simulations, the decay of coherent field oscillations and the subsequent thermalization of the resulting stochastic classical wave-field. The problem of reheating of the Universe after inflation…
We show that the inflaton condensate associated with a global symmetry can fragment into quasi stable Q balls after the end of inflation, provided the inflaton oscillations give rise to an effective equation of state with negative pressure.…
The fast simultaneous hadronization and chemical freeze out of supercooled quark-gluon plasma, created in relativistic heavy ion collisions, leads to the re-heating of the expanding matter and to the change in a collective flow profile. We…
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…
Whereas preheating after chaotic and hybrid inflation models has been abundantly studied in the literature, preheating in small field inflation models, where the curvature of the inflaton potential is negative during inflation, remains less…
In inflationary cosmology, the particles constituting the Universe are created after inflation in the process of reheating due to the interaction with the oscillating inflaton field. We briefly review the basics of the slow reheating, and…
When did the universe thermalize? In this talk I review the status of this issue and its importance in establishing the expected properties of dark matter, the growth of large-scale structure, and the viability of inflation models when…
We study the out-of-equilibrium nonlinear dynamics of fields after post-inflationary preheating. During preheating, the energy in the homogeneous inflaton is exponentially rapidly transfered into highly occupied out-of-equilibrium…
We study the quark deconfinement phase transition in hot $\beta$-stable hadronic matter. Assuming a first order phase transition, we calculate the enthalpy per baryon of the hadron-quark phase transition. We calculate and compare the…
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 discuss a minimal extension of the Standard Model (SM) where a single real scalar field serves as both inflaton and dark matter. The corresponding Lagrangian contains the renormalizable interactions of the inflaton field. Quantum effects…
A standard picture in cosmology has been emerging over the past decade in which a phase transition, associated with chiral symmetry breaking after the electroweak transition, has occurred at approximately $10^{-6}$ seconds after the Big…
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…
If inflaton couples very weakly to ordinary matter the reheating temperature of the universe can be lower than the electroweak scale. In this letter we show that the late reheating occurs in a highly non-uniform way, within narrow areas…
Heavy-ion collisions at BNL's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and CERN's Large Hadron Collider provide strong evidence for the formation of a quark-gluon plasma, with temperatures extracted from relativistic viscous hydrodynamic simulations…
The effect of a sharp front separating the quark-gluon plasma phase from the hadronic phase is investigated. Energy-momentum conservation and baryon number conservation constrain the possible temperature jump across the front. If one…
We study the role of the Standard Model Higgs condensate, formed during cosmological inflation, in the epoch of reheating that follows. We focus on the scenario where the inflaton decays slowly and perturbatively, so that there is a long…
The transition of sphaleron processes from non-equilibrium to thermal equilibrium in the early Universe is examined in detail. The relations between the damping rates and frequencies of the weak and QCD sphaleron degeneracy parameters are…
Reheating is a transition era after the end of inflation, during which the inflaton is converted into the particles that populate the Universe at later times. No direct cosmological observables are normally traceable to this period of…
A model of a universe without big bang singularity is presented, which displaysanearly inflationary period ending just before a phase transition to a deflationary epoch. The model produces enough heavy particles so as to reheat the universe…