Inflaton oscillations and post-inflationary reheating

Marcos A.G. Garcia, Kunio Kaneta, Yann Mambrini, Keith A. Olive

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

84 Scopus citations

Abstract

We analyze in detail the perturbative decay of the inflaton oscillating about a generic form of its potential V(φ) = φk, taking into account the effects of non-instantaneous reheating. We show that evolution of the temperature as a function of the cosmological scale factor depends on the spin statistics of the final state decay products when k > 2. We also include the inflaton-induced mass of the final states leading to either kinematic suppression or enhancement if the final states are fermionic or bosonic respectively. We compute the maximum temperature reached after inflation, the subsequent evolution of the temperature and the final reheat temperature. We apply our results to the computation of the dark matter abundance through thermal scattering during reheating. We also provide an example based on supersymmetry for the coupling of the inflaton to matter.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number012
JournalJournal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Volume2021
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab.

Keywords

  • dark matter theory
  • inflation
  • particle physics - cosmology connection
  • supersymmetry and cosmology

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