Related papers: A Hagedorn temperature in post-inflationary dynami…
No bootstrap assumption is needed to derive the exponential growth of the Hagedorn hadron mass spectrum: It is a consequence of the second law applied to a relativistic gas, and the relativistic equivalence between inertial mass and its…
I retrace the developments from Hagedorn's concept of a limiting temperature for hadronic matter to the discovery and characterization of the quark-gluon plasma as a new state of matter. My recollections begin with the transformation more…
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…
We have systematically estimated the possible temperatures obtained from an analysis of recent data on $p_t$ distributions observed at RHIC experiments. Using the fact that observed $p_t$ distributions cannot be described by the original…
We review the resonance gas formalism of hadron thermodynamics and recall that an exponential increase of the resonance spectrum leads to a limiting temperature of hadronic matter. We then show that the number p(n) of ordered partitions of…
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…
The reheating phase after inflation is one of the least observationally constrained epochs in the evolution of the Universe. The forthcoming gravitational wave observatories will enable us to constrain at least some of the non-standard…
We consider the non-equilibrium evolution of the inflaton field coupled to both lighter scalars and fermions. The dissipational dynamics of this field is studied and found to be quite different than that believed in inflationary models. In…
We present a holographic description of the thermal behavior of $ b \bar b$ heavy vector mesons inside a plasma at finite temperature and density. The meson dissociation in the medium is represented by the decrease in the height of the…
We consider the production of matter and radiation during reheating after inflation, restricting our attention solely to gravitational interactions. Processes considered are the exchange of a graviton, $h_{\mu \nu}$, involved in the…
A system H with a Hagedorn-like mass spectrum imparts its unique temperature TH to any other system coupled to it. An H system radiates particles in preexisting physical and chemical equilibrium. These particles form a saturated vapor at…
In many models of inflation, reheating is realized through a coupling between the inflaton and the Higgs boson. Often, the mass of the inflaton is of order $10^{13}~$GeV determined by the amplitude of the scalar fluctuation spectrum.…
A brief history of the observation of the onset of deconfinement - the beginning of the creation of quark gluon plasma in nucleus-nucleus collisions with increasing collision energy - is presented. It starts with the measurement of hadron…
We show how a radiation dominated universe subject to space-time quantization may give rise to inflation as the radiation temperature exceeds the Planck temperature. We consider dispersion relations with a maximal momentum (i.e. a mimimum…
The end of inflation is connected to the standard cosmological scenario through reheating. During reheating, the inflaton oscillates around the minimum of the potential and thus decays into the daughter particles that populate the Universe…
In the presence of self-interactions, the post-inflationary evolution of the inflaton field is driven into the non-linear regime by the resonant growth of its fluctuations. The once spatially homogeneous coherent inflaton is converted into…
We argue that $\Lambda$-driven inflation must overshoot into an era of deflation. The deflationary period ends quickly with the creation of a hot dense thermal barrier to the forward propagation of quantum correlations from the period of…
The time dependence of the temperature during the reheating process is studied. We consider the thermal feedback effects of the produced particles on the effective dissipation rate of the inflaton field, which can lead to enhanced…
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 revisit the renormalizable polynomial inflection point model of inflation, focusing on the small field scenario which can be treated fully analytically. In particular, the running of the spectral index is predicted to be $\alpha = -1.43…