Related papers: Reheating the Post Inflationary Universe
We show that dissipative effects have a significant impact on the evolution of cosmological scalar fields, leading to friction, entropy production and field fluctuations. We explicitly compute the dissipation coefficient for different…
We present a unified model where the same scalar field can drive inflation and account for the present dark matter abundance. This scenario is based on the incomplete decay of the inflaton field into right-handed neutrino pairs, which is…
We present a model of inflation where the inflaton is accommodated as a phantom field which exhibits an initial transient pole behavior and then decays into a quintessence field which is responsible for a radiation era. We must stress that…
Inflationary models involving more than one scalar field naturally produce isocurvature perturbations. However, while these are fairly well studied, less is known about their evolution through the reheating epoch, when the inflationary…
Bayesian inference techniques are used to investigate situations where an additional light scalar field is present during inflation and reheating. This includes (but is not limited to) curvaton-type models. We design a numerical pipeline…
We consider reheating in a class of asymptotically safe quantum field theories recently studied in \cite{Litim:2014uca, Litim:2015iea}. These theories allow for an inflationary phase in the very early universe. Inflation ends with a period…
Dissipative effects can lead to a friction term in the equation of motion for an inflaton field during the inflationary era. The friction term may be linear and localised, in which case it is described by a dissipation coefficient. The…
The dynamics of the inflaton field is studied in the context of its interaction with bosonic and fermionic fields modeled by a minimal SUSY like model. Our results are based on the observation that in typical multifield inflation models…
We analyze in detail the background cosmological evolution of a scalar field coupled to a massless abelian gauge field through an axial term $\frac{\phi}{f_\gamma} F \tilde{F}$, such as in the case of an axion. Gauge fields in this case are…
We calculate the general solutions for a warm inflationary scenario with weak dissipation, reviewing the dissipative dynamics of the two-fluid system, and calculate the bispectrum of the gravitational field fluctuations generated in the…
We show that it is possible to realize an inflationary scenario even without conversion of the false vacuum energy to radiation. Such cosmological models have a deflationary stage in which $Ha^2$ is decreasing and radiation produced by…
We calculate the relaxation rate of a scalar field in a plasma of other scalars and fermions with gauge interactions using thermal quantum field theory. It yields the rate of cosmic reheating and thereby determines the temperature of the…
We study in detail (p)reheating after multi-field inflation models with a particular focus on N-flation. We consider a variety of different couplings between the inflatons and the matter sector, including both quartic and trilinear…
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 show that the decay of the inflaton field may be incomplete, while nevertheless successfully reheating the universe and leaving a stable remnant that accounts for the present dark matter abundance. We note, in particular, that since the…
We consider the effects of fragmentation on the post-inflationary epoch of reheating. In simple single field models of inflation, an inflaton condensate undergoes an oscillatory phase once inflationary expansion ends. The equation of state…
An analytic means of studying the resonant decay of the inflaton field is developed for the case of background expansion, $H \neq 0$. It is shown that the parametric resonance in the inflaton's decay need not disappear when the expansion of…
In this work, we consider homogeneous oscillations of the inflaton field after inflation. In particular, we obtain an analytical result for the (average) equation of state for the oscillating inflaton field for the simplest…
Relaxation process of a coherent scalar field oscillation in the thermal bath is investigated using nonequilibrium quantum field theory. The Langevin-type equation of motion is obtained which has a memory term and both additive and…
Coupled, multi-field models of inflation can provide several attractive features unavailable in the case of a single inflaton field. These models have a rich dynamical structure resulting from the interaction of the fields and their…