Related papers: Comments on "Analytic and Numerical Study of Prehe…
Inflation has long been the accepted paradigm for understanding the early universe. Most models of inflation have a scalar field acting as the inflaton particle which decays after inflation during a process called reheating into standard…
We investigate the feasibility of models of inflation with a large Gauss-Bonnet coupling at late times, which have been shown to modify and prevent the end of inflation. Despite the potential of Gauss-Bonnet models in predicting favourable…
These lecture notes intend to form a short pedagogical introduction to inflationary cosmology, highlighting selected areas of recent progress such as reheating and the theory of cosmological perturbations. Problems of principle for…
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…
We consider a model with nonminimal derivative coupling of inflaton to gravity. The reheating process during rapid oscillation of the inflaton is studied and the reheating temperature is obtained. Behaviors of the inflaton and produced…
The reheating process in inflationary universe models is considered as an out-of-equilibrium mixture of two interacting and reacting fluids, and studied within the framework of causal, irreversible thermodynamics. The evolution of the…
This is a personal account of the early work that led to what is now known as the ``preheating stage" of inflationary cosmology. The broader applicability of the underlying instability mechanisms in cosmology are indicated.
We discuss preheating after multi-field inflation in the presence of several preheat matter fields that become light in the vicinity of (but not at) the inflatons' VEV, at distinct extra-species-points (ESP); this setup is motivated by…
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…
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 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 investigate the possibility of preheating in hybrid inflation. This scenario involves at least two scalar fields, the inflaton field $\phi$, and the symmetry breaking field $\sigma$. We found that the behavior of these fields after…
Previous studies demonstrate that the inflaton, when coupled to the hypercharge Chern-Simons density, can source an explosive production of helical hypermagnetic fields. Then, in the absence of fermion production, those fields have the…
We study Weyl-invariant purely gravitational theories formulated within the Einstein-Cartan framework. In the Einstein-frame description, these models are dynamically equivalent to standard general relativity coupled to an axion-like…
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…
A variant of hybrid inflation which is applicable in a wide class of supersymmetric grand unified models and reproduces the observed temperature perturbations of cosmic background radiation with natural values of the parameters is…
We investigate the possibility of achieving post-inflationary reheating exclusively through the gravitational interaction in Starobinsky inflation, which itself assumes nothing but gravity. We consider the possibility that the reheating…
In this note we propose a model independent framework for inflationary (p)reheating. Our approach is analogous to the Effective Field Theory of Inflation, however here the inflaton oscillations provide an additional source of (discrete)…
We investigate gravitational reheating in the Starobinsky model in the Jordan frame, where inflation is driven by an $R^2$ modification of gravity with no explicit inflaton field. In this description, reheating proceeds exclusively through…
In this letter we explore the possibility of creating the baryon asymmetry of the universe during inflation and reheating due to the decay of a field associated with the inflaton. CP violation is attained by assuming that this field is…