Gravitational dark matter production in Palatini preheating
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
2021-09-29 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
We study preheating in plateau inflation in the Palatini formulation of general relativity, in a special case that resembles Higgs inflation. It was previously shown that the oscillating inflaton field returns to the plateau repeatedly in this model, and this leads to tachyonic production of inflaton particles. We show that a minimally coupled spectator scalar field can be produced even more efficiently by a similar mechanism. The mechanism is purely gravitational, and the scalar field mass can be of order GeV, larger than the Hubble scale by many orders of magnitude, making this a candidate for superheavy dark matter.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2007.03484,
title = {Gravitational dark matter production in Palatini preheating},
author = {Alexandros Karam and Martti Raidal and Eemeli Tomberg},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.03484},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Section 4 extended, references added, typos fixed, matches published version